REVIEW: The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club by Gloria Chao

In The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club by Gloria Chao, Kathryn Hu walks in to discover her boyfriend proposing to another woman. When the two women discover a third woman who had been with Tucker, they decide to team up and prank him, only to discover him dead.

Kathryn agrees to help Detective Birch get to the bottom of the crime. Now the women have to band together to clear their names and find the true killer, all while a podcast that inspired their prank turns into a true crime podcast focusing on their case. Will the truth come out before it’s too late?

I struggled through this book, and there were several points I almost gave up on it completely. You have to really suspend your sense of belief for this one; for example, there’s no way a detective would find someone in someone’s apartment where there’s also a body and just agree to work with them to find the killer.

I won’t say what their prank involved in case you decide to read the book, but part of it was disgusting. I’m not in the author’s mind so I can’t say if she thought it’d be funny or not, but I found it extremely juvenile and turned me off of the book. This was one of the points where I almost stopped reading.

There’s no build up to the romantic relationship between Kathryn and Detective Birch. They go from being suspicious of one another, to Kathryn being angry at him because he was just doing his job, to Kathryn marching into the police station and kissing him. It felt a little pointless to even include it in the story, because there was nothing there to make readers root for Kathryn and Detective Birch to become a couple.

The podcast sections didn’t feel necessary. They weren’t entertaining and often felt like they were thrown in just to increase the word count of the book. I found myself skimming over these sections, as they didn’t add much, if anything, to the story itself.

The concept of the book had potential, but it fell short here. The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club is the first book in the Hu Done It series, but after reading this one, I’m not sure if I’d want to try the next one.

Book Info:

Publication: June 24, 2025 | MIRA | Hu Done It #1

The body in the closet was going to be a problem. Kathryn Hu knew it. Yes, Tucker Jones was a cheating scumbag, and yes, she’d agreed to meet Olivia and Elle—Tucker’s other girlfriends—to exact revenge for all he’d put them through… But then they found him. Dead.

Do they look guilty? Yes.

Do they feel guilty for having wished him dead just hours before? Maybe a little.

But—solid motive and a crime scene covered in their DNA aside—they’re innocent. They swear.

To clear their names, Kat, Olivia and Elle team up to find the real killer. But as they go undercover and lie to everyone, including the hot detective working the case, they realize that every person in their ex’s life had a reason to want him dead. Will they uncover the truth before they go down for a murder they didn’t commit?