Texas author turns defiance into blood and glitter in ‘Hot Girl Murder Club’

Ashley Winstead knows exactly what a well-placed knife can do — to a chest, to a plot, to a reader who thought they saw the twist coming. Her new thriller, “Hot Girl Murder Club,” is a stiletto-sharp book about pop stardom and vengeance that hides a serious whodunnit question inside its glossy packaging. On July 21, she’s bringing it back to the city she says built her, as Winstead will stop at Dallas’ Interabang Books on her book tour, ready to answer questions and share anecdotes.

Texas grit and fire

Winstead didn’t grow up in any one place, exactly. As a self-described “Navy brat,” she moved every couple of years, packing and unpacking a childhood in boxes. Texas, though, is the place she’s stayed longest — the closest thing she has to home ground.

Living in the “blue bubble of Houston” inside a famously red state has helped unveil the tension that feeds her.

“It contributes to this sense of defiance,” she says. “It keeps my fire lit.”

You can feel that fire in her fiction. Texas, she points out, has always harbored its share of defiant citizens, and that lineage runs straight into the feminist revenge thrillers she’s become known for — books like “The Last Housewife” and now “Hot Girl Murder Club.” Dallas gets a special share of the credit. Winstead earned her Ph.D. at Southern Methodist University, and she doesn’t hedge about what the city meant to her.

“It’s where my brain was born, in a lot of ways,” she says.

Giving herself permission

That brain was, for a long time, a very obedient one. Trained in academia and devoted to the literary canon, Winstead spent years believing that “real” writing meant something austere and lofty — and, crucially, not female.

For her undergraduate creative writing thesis, she wrote exclusively from male perspectives. She was convinced, she admits, that women’s voices “didn’t deserve to be on the page.”

It took over a decade — a decade of rejection and working other jobs — before she gave herself the permission that changed everything. She could write, she finally realized, from “a bitch’s perspective or a cheerleader’s perspective,” and find genuine value in those voices the canon had trained her to dismiss.

The result is a writer who takes the most maligned, glittered-over versions of femininity and treats them as worthy of scrutiny, sympathy and menace. That reclamation is the whole engine of her new book.

Blood on the marble, lyrics on the wall

Here’s the setup: Ten years ago, aspiring singer-actress Scout Sage lost the one person who mattered most, her younger sister, Georgia, who died under murky circumstances at a fancy Hollywood Hills party. Scout has spent the decade since clawing her way up the music industry, gathering a cohort of ambitious women around her like armor.

Then bodies start dropping. A string of targeted murders hit Los Angeles, each one aimed at a powerful figure who hurt a woman and walked away clean, and every crime scene points back to Scout. One killer even scrawls her song lyrics on the wall in blood. Overnight, she goes from mid-tier pop star to the world’s most famous alleged murderer, and detective Grey Holloway, no stranger to tragedy herself, is the one assigned to untangle it.

It’s propulsive, glamorous fun. But Winstead is doing something sharper underneath the sheen. The novel opens with one of its most haunting lines, spoken by Grey: “All dead women look alike, if you think about it… Like a man’s worst fear and his darkest fantasy combined.”

It’s a book fascinated by how we consume violence against women, and how women themselves are pulled toward the spectacle. Balancing that darkness is the fierce loyalty at the story’s core, captured in the vow the women share: “I walk in the shadows but am not afraid, because you are with me. There is no such thing as one woman alone.”

Even the title carries a double meaning. It arrived before the plot did, sparked by internet culture — a riff on Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” and Winstead’s own private nickname for a wave of books by women under 35. Inside the novel, being a member of the “hot girl murder club” isn’t a badge of honor; it’s a way for outsiders to shrink and dismiss the women it describes. The book spends 300-plus pages daring you to underestimate them anyway.

A homecoming at Interabang

For Winstead, the Dallas stop is a return to the place where her intellectual life took root.

“Dallas readers are incredible,” she tells us.

You can see her on Tuesday, July 21, at 6 p.m. at Interabang Books (5600 W Lovers Lane, Ste. 142) for a discussion and signing moderated by “The Secret Attic” author and Dallasite Chelsea Conradt. Details are available through Interabang’s event page. Bring your copy, bring your questions and bring a little Texas defiance. Winstead will recognize it.

Readers can order Ashley Winstead’s “Hot Girl Murder Club” through Interabang Books for $29.