My Thoughts
Death of a Dancing Queen kicks off with an instantly compelling premise: a young PI in over her head, trying to balance solving crimes with a crumbling personal life. Billie Levine is the kind of protagonist you root for not just because she’s clever, but because she’s flawed, vulnerable, and real. I was fully invested in her journey.

There’s a lot happening in this novel: a cold case murder, a current-day missing person investigation, a tangled relationship with a crime family, a mother with early-onset Alzheimer’s, a crumbling family business, and a whole cast of side characters with their own secrets. At times, the weight of these subplots slows the pace, particularly for a genre that thrives on momentum. The result is a story that leans as much into domestic drama as it does into detective noir and depending on your taste, that’s either a rich emotional layer or a slightly bloated distraction.

That said, the mystery itself is genuinely compelling. Giarratano knows how to set up a case with enough ambiguity to keep you guessing. The connections between past and present were intriguing, and I found myself second-guessing suspects all the way through. Every twist felt plausible, and the final reveal was satisfying without being too neat.

Billie herself is easily the highlight of this book. She’s young, scrappy, and smart, but not infallible. Her inner voice is sharp and occasionally funny, and her personal struggles, particularly in caring for her mother and dealing with the unreliability of her grandfather add depth to what could have been a one-dimensional sleuth character. She’s someone you want to follow across a whole series.

Giarratano’s writing is solid and gritty without being grim, sharp without being cynical. The New Jersey setting is well-drawn, and there’s a quiet love for the PI genre that runs underneath the plot, with just enough modern spin to keep it fresh.

Who Should Read It?
-Fans of contemporary mystery with strong female leads
-Readers who enjoy crime fiction with emotional subplots
-Those looking for a new series starter with long-term potential

Final Verdict
Death of a Dancing Queen is a smart, emotionally layered mystery with a protagonist you’ll want to root for and follow into future installments. While it sometimes stumbles under the weight of its many storylines, the foundation it lays is strong, and the ending makes the journey worth it. If you love amateur sleuths with messy lives and strong voices, this one’s for you.

Grateful to NetGalley, Angry Robot and Kimberly G. Giarratano for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this story in exchange for an honest review.

This was too slow for me. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for a review.

This was a classically complex crime novel with tonnes of action, a cast of interesting characters with intriguing and slowly unravelling backstories, and representation of Alzheimer’s and the caring responsibilities that come along with that.

I absolutely loved being immersed in Billie’s chaotic and rapid paced world, as a PI with responsibilities that seem endless, her need to prove herself shone through. I also loved the queer rep, the mysterious nature of everybody’s backstories, and the unconventional familial setup.

TEAMING with tension, this was a really great read. Definitely a fast paced one that I couldn’t put down!

Death of a Dancing Queen is a riveting fast-paced murder mystery/thriller with an intriguing and gutsy female main character at the helm of the story.

What made Death of a Dancing Queen stand out from a sea of crime novels were the victims and their backgrounds, in addition to the novel's protagonist and her family circumstances. It was interesting to read how Billie Levine (the novel's main character) navigates the news of her mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis and handles the fear that she also might have inherited the disease as she works on the case and tries to be there for her family.

As I previously mentioned, the murder victims of the novel and their backgrounds were intriguing. I enjoyed how the author used true crime podcasts and the interest they generated and worked it into the plot. Although Death of a Dancing Queen is not exactly a revolution in the crime/mystery/thriller genre it will be an entertaining read for readers who enjoy fast-paced murder mysteries, filled with family secrets, organised crime and strong, gutsy and flawed female main characters.

I read an eARC of this book so thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley.

This is a crime novel set in New Jersey where we follow a private investigator in her early twenties who has taken over her grandfather’s P.I. Business. She takes a case to look into the disappearance of a client’s girlfriend. The case is stirring up some old hurts for her but she’s desperate for the money. As she investigates she not only has to face people from her past but she also starts to see connections to an earlier case with a dancer who died decades earlier.

This was pretty entertaining. The first half definitely picked up the pace and I enjoyed that as everything started to come together and information was revealed.

What made this novel feel a bit different was all the pressures that our MC Billie is facing. Her mother has Alzheimer’s and she can’t be left alone. She lives with her mother, her brother and her Grandfather. However her brother is pressuring her to put their mother in a care home as he wants to move out. Her Grandfather is becoming increasingly unreliable due to his drinking. An old flame comes back into her life. She’s also struggling to make ends meet and has anxieties about her health. These surrounding pressures gave us some real insight into who Billie is as a character with how she dealt with them.

I really enjoyed this and if you like any kind of detective show I think you would like it too. In Death of a Dancing Queen we follow Billie a rookie P.I hired to find a missing college student, but the case has some eerie similarities to a murder that took place in 1991. There’s a lot going on in Billies personal life and her case just keeps snowballing into something bigger. We have rival gang families, stolen diamonds, returning ex boyfriends and more. I liked Billie as a character and although she made some mistakes (why does she never have backup?!) she was pretty savvy. She’s described as being similar to Veronica Mars, which I haven’t seen but the comparison makes me want to watch it. The overall story did have a lot to it, and a lot of moving pieces but I thought it all wrapped up nicely. Nothing felt too extraneous and I’m excited for the next book now that we have all this groundwork out of the way.

Thanks to Datura Books, NetGalley and Kimberly G. Giarratano for this e-copy!

This novel reminded me of Veronica Mars, one of my all-time favorite TV shows, which was a delightful surprise. However, despite featuring another young female PI, Billie stands out as a unique character distinct from Veronica. The story feels original and never veers into fanfiction territory.

The main character, Billie, captivated me, making me love this novel even more. Beyond her, the mystery presented in the story is compelling—I was genuinely intrigued by the disappearance of the woman and found myself guessing until the very end.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery thriller and would highly recommend it to anyone who appreciates amateur sleuth characters like Billie. I eagerly await more books in this series.

The suspense of this book was through the roof!
Loved the writing style and the original plot. It kept me guessing and second guessing about my theories till nearly the end. Great full for this to have been sent to me as a physical copy as I have already lent it to a friend for them to read.

I have to say that I fell head over heels in love with this tough, smart, funny and vulnerable private investigator. Billie Levine works for her grandfather’s PI Agency and she seems like a natural, somehow able to read people and follow the most complicated clues. What I loved most about her though was that she’s a full character. Lots of female investigators and cops are workaholics, wedded to their work and driven by the case to take risks and put themselves in danger. Billie may be a great investigator, but her main driver is getting paid and being able to have her mother looked after. Her mother has Alzheimer’s so Billie and her brother are trying to look after her at home. The struggles and realities of looking after a loved one with dementia were really well written and felt authentic. It was nice to see a detective being so pragmatic about her work, yes she wants to do a good job, but at the end of the day it’s a way of keeping a roof over their heads. It was great to see that real push and pull that women often feel between work and home. There was also a great authenticity to the family’s Jewish faith, it didn’t feel out of place or tacked on. It was an essential part of who this family are and how they relate to each other. The case is not an easy one. They are contracted to do some investigations into the son of a gangster who is facing serious jail time. Tommy’s girlfriend was found murdered in his garage. Obviously his father is keen to find any evidence that could see Tommy acquitted. Obviously this is a risky case, gangsters are not known for their openness and there are times when she is in danger. I always felt that Billie could handle herself in this world and it was a world I’d love to hear more about.

Me likey! I sure hope that this novel is the first in the series. I love so much about it - the noir atmosphere, which feels so real and authentic and there the light and the dark parts are tightly knotted into one working world of both criminals and honest, hardworking people; of both crime and family. The main character, newbie female private investigator Billie, who is so troubled with her family, her possible pre-condition of early Alzheimer (like her mother), her star-crossed love for man she really should not love and her so honest aspirations to solve the mystery of a murdered student and maybe even the dead exotic dancer from the years ago.
There are some aspects I do not like as well - namely that the old crime is based on very modern preconditions. I do not like the in-fashion topics, I find them clichey.
But otherwise - the heroine and her personal story is catchy, she is troubled and earnest enough to get my attention (I like my characters being real and messy) and I like her complicated personal life, too. I simply want more of her - even if I found the murder mystery being a bit boring towards the end. I do not care about the dead dancing queens, but I really do care about Billie.

This book was absolutely creepy and twisty, and I really enjoyed it! It hooked me in from the first few chapters!

Billie takes over her grandpa's investigation services company. For her first case, when a college kid arrives with a missing girlfriend case, she thinks that it's just a girlfriend avoiding this nutcase.

Layer by layer, Billie discovers many complications in the case. She isn't just missing but dead. And the case involves many bigshots. Along with this, Billie is pretty sure that Jasmine got killed because of a secret mission of hers to solve an old dancing queen's death case.

TBH, I would've stopped reading this in the first half. I couldn't keep track of characters and the story. It was messy. But then I got a grip, from 40%, on the story. Second half was good. It felt like there was more stable flow of the story. However, writing was a bit off for me.

I would give this 3.5 stars. The climax is good. No one would've actually expected. Overall, a decent one-time read.

Thank you Netgalley and publishers for providing me with an ARC.

This was an okay book, but unfortunately it wasn't really for me. There was a lot to take in, a lot of info dumping and I had to give up less than half way through.

When the case of a disappeared true crime podcaster is dropped in soon to be PI Billie Levine’s lap, she initially assumes that the girl is just hiding out from her boyfriend, that perhaps his drug use ran her off. But, said boyfriend was able to pay her full retainer no questions asked and she does need the money badly and business has not been as good as she had hoped. So off she goes, searching for a girl who might not want to be found, all in hopes of helping support her Alzheimer’s stricken mother. But the case is no where near as simple as that when the search for a missing girl turns into a search for who might have wanted to murder her. With the boyfriend as the police’s obvious suspect and things heating up between the two local crime families, will Billie be able to solve the case or will she go the way of the podcaster? And how does the thirty-some year cold murder of a club dancer tie into any of this?

Kimberly G. Giarratano’s Death of a Dancing Queen feels like it should be the fourth or fifth book in my next favorite detective series. But as the first book in a series it feels odd, like the balance is off. Like there is a ton of build up for these characters that is missing and I should know them better.

That actually feels like a good place to start because I had more than a touch of trouble getting into Death of a Dancing Queen early on. All of Billie’s worries over her mother’s Alzheimer’s, and the high likelihood that she would also wind up with Alzheimer’s in the future, it was just a lot for a book where this character is being introduced. Likewise, it could feel like the whole thing with Billie’s bad boy ex, Aaron, and the history between their families and the history with his family’s organization and the other gangs was just too much. All this back story and character history, it interrupted the story pretty badly for me. It got to the point where more and more seemed to focus in on Billie’s messy love life and the dangers the case is posing to her to the exclusion of the current case or the cold case.

And that ultimately made the book really easy to put down and walk away from. While there were interesting characters, many of them also just felt like short hand character types. The detective not the love interest. The bad boy ex who probably has a heart of gold under all that crime. The exhausted brother who just wants to have a life of his own. The alcoholic former cop, also the over protective grandfather. There might have been room to develop some of them more, but I found myself just not caring after a point. I got so tired of reading about how hot and dangerous Aaron Goff was while the book refused to move forward with either murder mystery. Tired of reading Billie worrying about when her brain was going to start failing her. Plus, the ending just felt like it was not well seeded enough to work. It felt like it cheated on some of the mystery solving in this mystery novel, for both cases.

I feel like Giarratano has to be a proficient writer, and it feels clear that she spent a lot of time developing Billie and her whole situation. Death of a Dancing Queen feels like it has been iterated on and reworked several times. But I feel like that is part of the problem I have with it. It feels like Giarratano has worked on this book and the impact she wanted from Billie’s life to the point that it stopped being an entry point to a series, that she knows these characters so well that she has forgotten that the reader is just meeting them. And that lands Death of a Dancing Queen with a two out of five. The idea was promising, but the execution left me cold.

Death of a Dancing Queen – Kimberly G. Giarratano



I was given a copy of this book through Net Galley in order to provide an honest review.

Kimberly G. Giarratano is an American author who writes mysteries for teens and adults. She is a former librarian and is currently an instructor at SUNY Orange County Community College and reviews for BookPage.



Bill Levine works for her grandfather’s private investigation firm and does what she can to make ends meet and help her brother care for their mother suffering from Alzheimer's. Life is hard and stressful and most days everything is a constant battle and work is hard to find.

So, when a junkie college kid, Tommy Russo, seeks her out to help find his missing girlfriend, and with wads of cash, thanks to a wealthy family – who is she to pass this job up.

But this quickly turns into something much more than Billie could have bargained for. What should have been a simple case of a girlfriend hiding away until the junkie boyfriend gets the message turns into the cover up of a cold case – the death of a dancing queen.

Which consequently means Billie must deal with her criminal ex – heir to an empire that has become embroiled in her case and with ties to the cold case, the junkie’s girlfriend took upon herself to look into. Now Billie must find out the truth about the death of a dancing queen and why it ended in the murder of an innocent girl – all while keeping herself and her family afloat. Easier said than done when everyone has secrets they are trying to keep buried.



“Death of a Dancing Queen” is a riveting crime thriller that grabs a hold of you as soon as you turn the first page and won't let you go until you’ve turned the last one. This whole story from start to finish was a tragically beautiful tale. Billie is a relatable character that I really felt for, the struggles she was going through, how hard she was punishing and pushing herself. The case really seemed to bring up a lot of personal struggles, so it was good to see her work through it and uncover the truth. And the story of the dancer that was tragically murdered all those years ago was just absolutely heartbreaking – it was really something to see the truth come out the way it did after all the time that had passed.

A book that stands out from the crowd. The characters and the setting are written exceptionally well.

Belinda "Billie" Levine is a recent college graduate that works as an unlicensed PI for her ex cop grandfather's detective agency. She gets hired by a wealthy college drug addict to help find his girlfriend, Jasmine who strips in the evenings at a local club. This book was a fast paced, small town mystery. I really enjoyed the sassy, independent nature of Billie. There were multiple layers and connecting cords to the story that really have you trying to figure out if it all ties together and how the pieces fit in. The writing was good and overall I really liked this book, Excited to see if this turns into a series!

Thank you NetGalley and Datura for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The plot is as deep and dark as it gets, multi-layered with 'who knew what when?' as the strands come together and the finer details get filled in. This is an absolutely compelling, gripping book full of mystery and suspense. Only a few authors can write deeply involving psychological drama of the very highest quality.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words some text written has been typed in red and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5/5.

This thriller had me going in circles and in the end had to get pen and paper out to be able to formulate my theory of what had happened and then to see i was right. This engaged me from page one and would love to see more stories following the main characters and how she develops her techniques

This is a new series, featuring a great new detective. Billie Levine takes over her grandfather's detective agency -- nothing fancy, she mostly sets up shop at a table in the neighborhood deli. She gets involved in a case involving a long-dead exotic dancer and finds her own life at risk in the process. I hope this goes on to be a mulitiple book series, and I look forward to recommending this title.