Review: Hot Wax by M. L. Rio

Thank you to Netgalley & Headline for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

Publication date: 9th September 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 400

The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is. Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills’ wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning—one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.

The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil’s beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she’d lost forever: desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country—and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back—where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.

A sharp, scintillating, snowball of a novel, I was absolutely gripped and couldn't put this one down. Which is kind of unsurprising given how I felt about Rio's debut novel "If We Were Villains". And yet it still took me by surprise. A slow build crescendo that had me in a chokehold by the end as I feverishly turned the pages waiting for the blow to fall.

It's that kind of book, the slow build symphony that draws you in in pieces. A slow hook here, a flash of fear there, the electric breathlessness of Gil and the Kills as they perform in front of a raucous crowd. The novel unspools and drags you in. Teasing you with a sense of uncertainty, the promise of things whirling to a fever pitch before falling apart.

And when they do...

My breath caught in my throat, heart in my mouth as the fistfuls of the picture Rio had offered throughout tumbled into a cohesive whole and I wanted to howl and hold them all tight and go back to the start where maybe, just maybe, things might turn out differently this time.

It's a beautiful novel. No, perhaps that's the wrong word. It's raw and vibrant and takes you in its teeth. Points you towards the bright lights and the violence and the promise that practically vibrates off each page and dares you to look. The prose is delicious, the characters flawed and aching with humanity, and the story a sweeping catharsis as it unfolds.

I adored it.