With thanks to Headline and NetGalley for the arc.
If We Were Villains is one of my favourite reads so I was looking forward to this new novel by M.L. Rio even though their recent work ‘Graveyard Shift’ was slightly disappointing. Unfortunately I found Hot Wax to be both frustrating and slightly disappointing too.
The novel tells the story of Suzanne, whose father is in a rock group and who is drawn into the ‘on-the-road’ lifestyle of the group and is ultimately scarred by the tragic imploding of the group she adores. Rio’s writing is excellent - I would not normally contemplate picking up a book with this kind of storyline, so the fact that I made it to the end is testament to the craft of the author’s writing - but unfortunately I did find the plot line to be a little dull and self-indulgent, and the multiple timelines, multiple pov’s and weird subplot around Suzanne’s husband’s apparent breakdown and descent into spouse-abusing-wannabe-kidnapper both distracting and confusing.
If you enjoy books like Daisy Jones and the Six (I haven’t read it but…) then I imagine you’ll enjoy Hot Wax. Sadly this book just wasn’t for me.

Unfortunately, this book was a miss for me. After loving If We Were Villains but being disappointed by Graveyard Shift, I was cautiously optimistic going into this book. This has Rio's trademark clever writing, but none of the warmth or compelling characters. The most interesting character was Gil, our main character Suzanne's father, who's an aspiring rock and roll musician whilst also trying to balance his family life. He doesn't always makes the best decisions, but you can see how much he cares for his daughter.

Whilst I enjoyed the writing, I was frustrated by the structure of this novel. Hot Wax is told in dual timelines: one present day, and the other flashbacks to Suzanne's life growing up around the rock 'n roll lifestyle that her father belonged to. However, these flashbacks weren't chronological—Suzanne would be 16, then she'd be 11, then she'd be 30, and back to 11 again. This just made the storytelling feel slightly random at times. We also had Suzanne's husband Rob narrating some chapters, which felt very out of place and jarring to the rest of the narrative. This was a story about rock 'n roll, about family, about belonging and identity—not a domestic thriller about a man trying to track down his missing wife. There were some good scenes describing her father's music shows, and some interesting interactions between the band members, but mostly this novel felt meandering and, especially in the middle, boring.

The ending was especially jarring and invited more questions than it answered. There was a large plot point that didn't seem thought out at all, and frankly irritated me.
Ultimately, this book wasn't for me, but I do like M.L. Rio's writing and I'd still be willing to try her other books in future. Thank you to netgalley for the e-arc.

ML Rio has done it again!

The writing has me more emotional than I expected. I knew Rio's writing could make me cry, but this was a rough read, especially the first half.

Now this is a tough read, with bad parenting and child neglect from the offset. I was sobbing at a few of these scenes and had to take a break.

The structure of the book was so interesting, Two timeline, with the present tense timeline being split into two POV's.

Hot Wax by M. L. Rio is an electrifying dive into the chaotic, dark heart of rock and roll, and the lingering shadows of a fractured childhood. Set in 1989 and spanning decades, this story follows Suzanne, a young girl irresistibly drawn into her father’s world of electric guitars and wild tour life, only to witness a violent act that shapes the course of her entire life.

Rio’s storytelling is vivid and immersive, capturing both the exhilaration of the music scene and the raw emotional turmoil of a family torn apart by fame and secrecy. Suzanne’s journey from a rebellious youth swept up in the chaos, to a quiet suburban life, and then back onto the road in search of truth and identity, is as gripping as it is poignant.

The narrative unfolds like a rock anthem — wild, intense, and full of unexpected twists — yet beneath the roar lies a deeply human story about loss, survival, and the desperate need to reclaim one’s self. The characters are richly drawn and flawed, especially Suzanne, whose vulnerability and strength resonate long after the last page.

Hot Wax explores themes of memory, trauma, and redemption with a raw honesty that never feels exploitative. The tension between Suzanne’s past and present, and the collision course with her husband Rob, adds a compelling emotional core to this raucous ride.

This book is perfect for anyone who loves a story about music, family secrets, and the messy paths to healing. M. L. Rio delivers a thrilling, heartfelt read that will stay with you long after the final chord fades.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

Thank you to M. L. Rio, Headline | Wildfire, and NetGalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Rio is an incredible writer - the sentences flowed beautifully and the setting felt true. However, there were too many characters (most I didn’t care about at all) and a strange sub-plot about her husband becoming a nutter which seemed completely superfluous? The plot felt like a mix of a grimdark Daisy Jones literary fiction and a cheap airport domestic thriller.

The pacing was completely off too - about 25% of the middle present day could’ve been wiped. I’m sorry, I’m not going to root for a stinky trailer throuple. I saw a different review calling this a coming of age story - it was a coming of stench, if anything.

Whilst it read well, most of the scenes seemed unnecessary and repetitive. The band scenes were the most interesting but also simultaneously felt lacklustre. I think some things are best experienced in person or on screen. I found myself wanting to dnf but pushed on to find out what actually did happen in the past - about a 10 page payoff in the end. I don’t think I would actually recommend this.

I ordered Villains, and was so very much looking forward to this long awaited second novel. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to my expectations. Maybe it’s just that I have no interest in the subject matter, but a lot of the syntax feels very odd, and none of it really flows. DNF sadly.

This is a novel about Suzanne, the daughter of a soon to be famous musician, about family relations, grieve and childhood trauma set in the 80’s American rock’n’roll scene and how that impacted her adult life.

Hot Wax is a slow burn, a bit too slow for me. I kept reading for the tour life and the desert ghost towns not really loving any of the characters but it’s beautiful how the ending explains Suzannes story.

Thanks to Headline and Netgalley for the arc!

**Hot Wax** may not match the immediate brilliance of *If We Were Villains*, but it’s a deeply resonant and beautifully bruised return to form for M.L. Rio—an elegy in motion, wrapped in grit, grief, and the faded echo of a song long forgotten. Rather than dazzling with plot, it smolders quietly, drawing its power from emotional honesty, atmosphere, and the slow, searing unraveling of a life steeped in memory.

At the center is Suzanne—a woman half-built from the wreckage of her past and barely tethered to her present. Her cross-country journey becomes a slow excavation of buried pain: a fractured childhood shaped by her volatile, legendary father; the hollow comforts of a marriage that no longer fits; and the unspoken ache of identity suspended between who she was and who she might still become. The narrative, drifting between the chaotic glamour of the late '80s music scene and the quiet discontent of middle age, moves with a kind of poetic disarray—sometimes messy, sometimes meandering, but always intimate.

Suzanne is a wonderfully complex creation: infuriating one moment, achingly vulnerable the next. She lies, runs, lashes out—but beneath every impulsive act is a thrum of raw humanity that keeps you tethered to her. Her evolving bond with fellow wanderers Simon and Phoebe brings unexpected light, their camaraderie offering fleeting warmth against the novel’s darker themes.

While the middle third loses some narrative tension, trading momentum for mood, that very looseness feels intentional. This isn’t a story driven by plot twists—it’s a meditation on legacy, self-destruction, and the haunting power of what we carry with us. Rio’s writing remains as rich and evocative as ever—each page steeped in nostalgia, longing, and a kind of weary beauty that lingers.

*Hot Wax* doesn’t shout—it hums, crackles, and eventually breaks into a quiet, devastating chorus. Not flawless, but deeply affecting. A book that stays with you like the last notes of a song you didn’t know you needed to hear again.

In standard M.L Rio fashion this book is a slow burn which has some great parts

As always with Rio’s writing the description is fantastic and she sets a scene amazingly well. Where this story excels is in the flash books to Suzanne’s childhood on the road with her dad. Those parts are where the story truly comes alive. Those scenes are atmospheric, riddled with gritty drama and interlinked with an emotional connection between a father and daughter that don’t have the most straight forward relationship.

I did have some issues with the pacing. The story didn’t really kick in until the 40-50% mark and I felt that the time taken at start of the book to set up Suzanne in a “new life” could have been halved and spent on the ending which felt very rushed in comparison.

Overall and easy read, perfect for a holiday book. If you are Rio fan you will love this one

Thankyou to Headline and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review

Hot Wax follows Suzanne whose father is in a band. The story takes place in 1989 when Suzanne is age 10 and then in the present day when Suzanne is a grown woman who has left her husband. At age 10 Suzanne is desperate to spend time with her father and jumps at the chance to go on tour with her father’s band, Gil and the Kills. Suzanne witness an act of violence and she stops speaking to her father. In the present she has a quiet suburban life with her husband but her father dies and she decides to go on a road trip to find answers. She finds two vagabonds on the road and discovers an inner desire but her husband refuses to let her go and is determined to bring her back.

This was enjoyable and I’m giving this 4.5 stars rounded up to a 5. This had a slow start but I soon got into the story and I liked the two time frames. I liked how each chapter was named after a song title which I didn’t realise until I got halfway into this book. I liked how the relationships developed in the present and how things happened with Suzanne’s husband Rob. I found the tour sections to be difficult to read because it was uncomfortable how unprotected Suzanne was as a 10 year old from violence and other explicit content. This was written well and I had a good time reading this. It is completely different from If We Were Villains though and reminded me of Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia with the vibes and old records. I would definitely recommend this novel and I really enjoyed it.

This book has a compelling concept and a well-executed multiple time line that follows Suzanne. We see her life as the child of an up and coming rockstar and then as an adult. The details of life on the road and her perspective as a documentarian through her camera were aptly done. The prose is strong and the descriptive imagery beautiful.

Saying all that, this book didn’t ever really grab me. I found it hard to get into and I kept waiting for a momentous reveal or twist that didn’t really come. I really liked the characters of Simon and Phoebe, Gil and Gracie but felt that the Rob storyline was unnecessary, predictable and didn’t add anything to the story except some shoehorned sense of peril.

Thank you to Headline, Wildfire and NetGalley for an advanced copy of Hot Wax by M. L. Rio.

I loved If We Were Villains so was delighted to be able to read this one in advance.

If you like Daisy Jones and The Six, you’ll love this. It is darker, grittier and keeps you on your toes, knowing bad stuff is to come, all the while entertaining you with its heavy rock and roll edge.

Oh no, were my expectations too high? I read If We Were Villains right after its release and loved it immediately, so after eight years of waiting to see what M.L. Rio would write next, I was incredibly keen to get my hands on this.

After infrequently keeping up with M.L. Rio for almost a decade now, I was aware she's not only a Shakespearean scholar but also a music nerd and vinyl collector, so writing a book like Hot Wax felt appropriate.

We meet Suzanne in the late 80s, when she's the ten-year-old daughter of the magnetic rockstar Gil, who's touring with his band the Kills while navigating internal power struggles. Twenty-nine years later, Suzanne is still processing things that happened in her childhood. When her father dies, she leaves behind her quiet suburban life and her mild-mannered husband Rob to join two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home. But her past is not ready to let go of her yet...

I didn't vibe with the protagonist. Interestingly, this is the first time Rio has released a book with just one protagonist. While both If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift focus on a larger cast, this one closely follows Suzanne. Unfortunately, I found it hard to really sympathise with her. She likes photography, and that was one thing that made her human-like to me, but apart from that, the only thing about her I was interested in was the people she met. Simon, who only has three fingers and lives with the enigmatic Phoebe, makes you curious. Gil, the rockstar who has a complicated love-hate relationship with one of his fellow band members, feels a lot richer in depth. It's not even that Suzanne isn't believable — quite the opposite, she's pretty real — I just didn't care much about her.

The going back and forth in time drove me crazy. I think this made me realise that I'm not the biggest fan of non-linear storytelling, especially when tension is built by not filling certain gaps for the reader. The idea is nice, actually: the novel is structured as if you were going through your favourite records, playing them one after another. After the A-Side comes the B-Side and then you move on to the next. What I didn't like was that each chapter would be set at another point in time: we move from Suzanne's childhood, where she's touring with her dad, to her life settled and married in adulthood, and then jump forward to what feels like present day, where she's on the run. Making sudden cuts from a ten-year-old to a forty-something-year-old Suzanne not only made my head spin but also never fully allowed me to settle in any period.

I didn't get where this was going for the longest time. This certainly feels more like Daisy Jones & The Six than The Secret History, but then it's also not a full-on rock and roll of the 80s kind of novel, since so much of it just isn't set during that time. But what kind of novel is it, then? As I was reading on and on, I began to wonder where this would go and, worse, what I should care about. Similarly to my experience with Emma Cline's The Guest, I felt lost in the story, not really recognising a beginning, middle or end. Was this meant as some sort of pastiche? There were certain passages that felt so concerned with giving off a sense of cool, featuring a lot of brand name-dropping in order to create a sense of the past (Keds, Levi's, Wayfarer). I still recognised what I liked about Rio's writing so much — the careful way in which she sets her scenes, her ability to describe characters in a sleek and flawed fashion.

This was one of my most anticipated releases this year, and I honestly can't believe I didn't love it. I still hope this will be received well when it comes out in a couple of months, because I think M.L. Rio is one deserving of success. I will be looking forward to whatever she's going to do next, despite this book not having been for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an Advance Reading Copy of this.

This gave so much from Suzanne's childhood, her marriage and now finding out who she really is with some obstacles in her way.
You feel her freedom and emotions within the writing which makes you feel for the protagonist throughout the book.
It's definitely a wild ride.

Let's be honest, there was never any doubt that this would be a five star read.
But Jesus Fucking Christ

When I read If We Were Villains, I consumed it in a day, but this book, I savoured this book. I spent my time reading it so I could take it every single sentence and every single word so I didn't miss a thing, and I'm so glad I did, this is not a book to be rushed, take your time reading this and savour it.

This book is just pure rock n' roll - it's loud, it's messy, it's dirty, it's gritty, and it's bloody.

The book is set is dual timelines, The A Side, which is her younger self; who is going along on a tour with her father and his band, before everything went to shit, and The B Side, which is Suzanne 29 years later, still running from her past and what happened all those years ago on the tour. Sprinkled in between are Snapshots of her life in between the two timelines, little snippets of how she was dealing and what she was doing in the limbo between the two timelines.
Often, with a lot of books that have dual timelines, one will end up being more interesting than the other, but Rio done the two of these so well, I was so intrigued to find out what happened, or what was going to happen in both, that everything I got to a new chapter I was thrilled and pissed because I got to find out what was happening in one, but that meant I had to wait to find out what was happening in the other.

The characters are imperfect, and a lot of the time, awful, but God were they real. I spent so much of the book wondering if I liked certain characters or not because they were so complex. Rio has such an incredible way of making made up characters feel like real people, with real issues and real, messy lives, that are genuinely flawed people. But she's also incredible and making dislikable characters, there were some characters in this book that I loathed, and these characters deserved to be loathed.

Rio's writing style is so beautiful, she has such a stunning way of writing prose that can just take my breath away.

This is absolutely a book that is going to stay with me for a long time, like most of M.L Rio's writing. It's something I'm going to think about constantly for a long time. While I was reading it, I didn't want to put it down, and while not reading it's all I could think about. Now even hours after finishing it, it hasn't left my mind for even a second.
I need a strong drink after reading this book.

This thought-provoking novel follows 10-year-old Suzanne as she embarks on a tour with her dad and his rock band. Through her young eyes, we experience the highs and lows of life on the road—its excitement, unpredictability, and underlying dangers. The story alternates with chapters set years later, where an adult Suzanne grapples with the grief of her father's death and the breakdown of her marriage.

The dual timelines are woven together beautifully, offering a poignant exploration of memory, loss, and the long-lasting impact of childhood experiences. The book doesn’t rely on melodrama—its emotional depth comes from the quiet, realistic portrayal of pain and resilience.

While I didn’t cry, the story stayed with me long after the last page. A powerful, introspective read that lingers.

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.

Gritty, dirty and delicious.

I enjoyed the way this one was written, playing Suzanne’s life story out on both sides of the record. I also enjoyed the road trip setting, with vivid descriptions that meant it was easy to become engrossed in the story in its own charming, sweaty way.

The pacing of this was slightly off-putting at times and I do think some of the plot gave off filler vibes - but this was a good ride all the same.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy!

DNF.
Slow, agonisingly descriptive, and boring.

I don't think rock and roll as a genre works well in print - honestly, it gives major second-hand embarrassment. You need it on the stage or screen, hear the music, see the leather, the makeup, the sweat.

I think ML Rio may have been a one-hit wonder (no pun intended). Her 2024 novella Graveyard Shift was also a DNF for me, for pretty much the same reasons as this one. If We Were Villains was filled with obsession and murder and lust that was intoxicating... and that sadly she hasn't been able to replicate since.