Bad Girls Make Good Liars Book Review and Summary
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Olivia Harris - 15 Oct, 2026 15:50
Author: Sarina Bowen
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL
The provenance of a paperback matters less to me than the crispness of an untrimmed deckle edge, yet here we are, staring down Sarina Bowen’s forthcoming Bad Girls Make Good Liars with the casual dread of a trust-funder opening a tax audit. Is it Friday yet? God, I hope so, because the algorithmic pulp-peddlers are at it again.
Doppelgängers and Disposable Income
Private investigators with mysterious pasts in Maine are the pumpkin spice lattes of contemporary suspense. Give me a break. Ivy Quillan spends a decade hiding in the pine trees—very chic, very rustic—only to have her peace shattered by an ex-boyfriend hauling out a missing influencer who happens to possess her exact face. A doppelgänger plot. Groundbreaking. One expects the digital proletariat to eat this up on BookTok while waiting for their DoorDash. Bowen previously gave us The Five Year Lie, which played fast and loose with domestic paranoia. Now we pivot to identity theft via aesthetic cloning.
The Aesthetics of Impposture
Let us dissect the prose economy here. We are told the missing girl, Kelsey Chillingham, has the same voice, the same laugh, the same everything. It is peak parasocial horror. The internet is obsessed. Naturally. Because nothing terrifies the terminally online quite like a girlboss duplicate stealing your brand equity. Yet the synopsis reads like a masterclass in high-concept hand-waving. Ivy finds people for a living. Oh, the irony! She is a sleuth who gets sleuthed by her own genetics. Absolute brain-rot territory. It lacks the understated psychological claustrophobia of Patricia Highsmith or the acidic domesticity of early Gillian Flynn. Instead, we get a thriller engineered in a lab for maximum airport bookstore velocity.
The Romance Industrial Complex
And then, of course, there is the requisite romantic entanglements. Frazier Morello. The man she never forgave, who conveniently drags her back into the narrative meat-grinder. Because a woman simply cannot solve her own existential crisis without a brooding ex standing in the periphery looking moody in a flannel shirt. It is aggressively predictable. I would bet a vintage first-edition Nabokov that the third act involves a dramatic confrontation in a remote cabin while a nor’easter blows out the cell service.
Yet, I will read it. I always do, if only to sneer at the pacing over my morning espresso. We all have our vices. Mine just happen to cost thirty-four dollars a hardcover and require a leather bookmark.
Time to escape this digital squalor. I am going to browse real estate listings in Tuscany to cleanse my palate.
