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.
- Title: Hot Wax
- Author: M.L. Rio
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Publication Date: September 9th, 2025
- Genre: Thriller
- Source: Digital ARC via Netgalley/Publishers in exchange for an honest review
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: death, murder, blood, graphic depictions of violence, gun violence, drug use, physical abuse, miscarriage (on page)
- Rating: ★★★★.75
We all know that M.L. Rio’s debut novel If We Were Villains is my favorite book of all time. I own [redacted] number of copies and have read it [redacted] number of times. At this point, that book is a part of my core DNA. Because of my deep and never ending love of If We Were Villains I’ve been looking forward to Rio’s next full length novel before it had a title or release date. I didn’t care what it was about, I knew that I needed to read it and that it would be one of my most anticipated books of whatever year it came out.
When I opened my email in May to see that I had an ARC of Hot Wax, I was literally in shock. I couldn’t believe it, the next M.L. Rio book, a book I’d been looking forward to for so long, was not only coming out in just 4 short months, but a copy was available for me to read right that instant. I’d be lying if I said that the excitement didn’t also come with a little worry. I love If We Were Villains so much, I can and have waxed poetic about it at literally every chance available to me, and am always telling people how brilliant it is. How can any other book measure up? Even one written by the same author? Going in, I told myself to remember that this is a different book about different characters; I couldn’t expect myself to feel and react the same way that I did to Villains, and I wasn’t going to hold Hot Wax up against Villains at every turn. Hot Wax is its own body of work and I needed to view it as such. With that in mind, I opened the ebook, and while this is a very different book from Villains, Hot Wax led me on just as wild and crazy of a ride.
This book was a full body experience. In my opinion, Rio is one of the most (if not the most) atmospheric writers right now. Her writing is so visceral; you can hear the music, see the landscapes, feel the heat and bodies in the crowds, taste the blood after a fight; everything that these characters were feeling and experiencing I felt alongside them. Hot Wax really feels like a book that you can escape into, which is always a major win for me. I didn’t even realize how deeply I was connecting with this story and its characters until the last few chapters where I was so overwhelmed that I just started crying and cried through the end of the book.
The complexity of this story was incredible. I love a story with dual timelines, and I thought the way the chapters would shift from the past to the present was done extremely well; sometimes dual timeline books can focus too heavily on one of the timelines, or swap timelines in odd places, but I think Rio did a great job of balancing the two and keeping both timelines interesting. Even while I was reading it I was thinking about when I would reread it because there’s so many layers to the story and the characters, there’s no way to process everything in one read. That’s not to say that if you only read it once you won’t get the full impact of the book, I just think that with the depth of these characters, the more you reread the book the more you’ll get out of it.
Suzanne and I truly could not be more different; I’m pretty sure if I met this woman in real life she would absolutely despise me 🤣 but I felt so connected to her and her story. I loved following her from her childhood into adulthood and seeing the ways that she changed but also stayed the same and how her parents (especially her dad) and surroundings really influenced the person that she became and how she handled (or didn’t) certain situations. More so, I loved seeing her come into her own as the story progressed; I think the dual timeline and getting to go back and forth from her adolescence to adult years really helped show her growth and lack thereof in certain ways.
Something that I love about M.L. Rio is that, If We Were Villains, Graveyard Shift and Hot Wax all have wildly different tones, but are unmistakably her work. If you’ve enjoyed her previous stories, you’ve definitely got to put Hot Wax on your tbr.
Links for Hot Wax: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop
M. L. Rio has been an actor, a bookseller, an academic, and a music writer. She holds an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in English literature. She is the author of the internationally bestselling novel If We Were Villains and the USA Today bestselling novella Graveyard Shift. Her next novel, Hot Wax, will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2025.
M. L. Rio holds an MA in Shakespeare studies from King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe, and a PhD in English literature from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research explores representations of madness and mood disorder on the early modern stage. She never stays in one place for long, but keeps her books, records, and four-legged sidekick in south Philadelphia.
She is represented by Arielle Datz of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency, Inc.
