First published 2021
Becca Martinello's mom dies in a car crash. That's already bad enough. Then a stranger named Stef shows up with news that cracks Becca's world open: her perfectly ordinary soccer mom was secretly Molly Mauler, one of the most popular serial killers on Alcatraz 2.0, a reality TV show built around murder entertainment. Becca doesn't know what to believe. To find out the truth, she gets herself onto Who Wants to Be a Painiac?, the latest Alcatraz 2.0 spinoff, where contestants compete to become the next big-hit serial killer. The blood and bodies are supposed to be fake. The screaming is supposed to be performance. But people start dying for real, and Becca is trapped inside a show that has stopped pretending. She needs to figure out what her mom was hiding, who is actually behind the murders, and whether she can get out before the cameras catch something that can't be edited out. The story sits at the center of grief, identity, and a media culture that treats violence as content.
Genres: dystopia, mystery, horror, thriller, social-issues, young-adult
Vibes: dark, emotionally-intense, fast-paced, gritty, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-secrets, hidden-identity, trapped-setting, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Alcatraz 2.0
352 pages · Paperback · Disney Hyperion
Content warnings: death, murder, violence