Reality television: it’s trashy. It’s fun. It’s the backdrop to our century, the deeply embarrassing soundtrack to our lives. It’s also….common as a trope in crime fiction? And since I noticed this weird fact, I had to put together a little roundup of some of the great thrillers and mysteries coming out over the past few years that engage with reality TV, its artifice, its strugges, and its discontents.
Claire Jiménez, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez?
(Grand Central)
In this moving take on the vanished woman trope, Ruthy Ramirez disappears on her way home from school at age 13, leaving behind a family in tatters. Twelve years later, she seems to have reappeared—on a trashy reality show called “Catfight.” Is it Ruthy? Where has she been? And will she and her family ever reforge their bonds?
Alexandra Oliva, The Last One
(Ballantine)
I really enjoyed this one when it first came out. A contestant on a reality survival show emerges from the forest to find that the world itself has irrevocably changed, and has become, well, one big survival show. As she tries to make her way home to her family, she’ll test all her new skills and more in the struggle.
Blair Braverman, Small Game
(Ecco)
The contestants on a reality survival show are left unmoored when their producers vanish and a disaster appears to have disrupted the outside world. Unlike in Oliva’s The Last One, Small Game ends just as the characters venture forth into their new reality, and focuses more on the day-to-day aspects of survival, but the two should certainly be considered complimentary narratives.
Sarah Strohmeyer, We Love to Entertain
(Harper Paperbacks, April 25)
Home improvement gone haywire!!! In We Love to Entertain, three teams are competing to win a design and home improvement contest on a reality show called “To the Manor Build,” but disaster strikes when the engaged couple rehabbing an estate in Vermont disappears on the eve of their wedding. Their assistant, already ostracized by her home town for a mysterious incident in high school, quickly becomes the main suspect, but her mother is determined to clear her name and find the real culprit. If you like this book, check out these HGTV-themed cozies.
Jessica Knoll, The Favorite Sister
(S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)
In The Favorite Sister, several powerful women compete on a reality show called “Goal Diggers,” including two sisters, one of whom is in possession of an explosive secret about the other. And of course, one of the contestants soon ends up dead…Jessica Knoll has her long-awaited third novel out this October, Bright Young Women, so it’s a great time to revisit her short, but brilliant, oeuvre.
Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants To Cuddle
(Zando)
I loved this take on the The Bachelor so much that I just can’t stop recommending it. When the final contestants for a dating reality show decamp to the Pacific Northwest for the last rounds of the competition, they aren’t expecting to encounter a female Sasquatch or her group of protectors, and yet, one contestant finds herself far more enamored with the Sasquatch than she ever was with the Bachelor…
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain Gang All Stars
(Pantheon Books, coming May 2)
In a not-too-distant future, prisoners with at least one life sentence on their record are given a choice: serve out their sentence, or participate in a gladiatorial blood sport that is near-guaranteed to kill them. If they survive all their battles-to-the-death over a five year period, they’ll be freed—but surviving isn’t exactly built into the system. Chain Gang All Stars is a brilliant and cutting send-off of reality television, football, and mass incarceration.
