I was so stoked to see Sarai Walker had come out with a new novel: Furious Violet. Her debut, Dietland, is one of my favorite books ever, so I was just shredded when her sophomore novel, The Cherry Robbers, was such a let down. I crossed my fingers that Furious Violet would be peak Walker, and readers, it did not disappoint.

Violet West Shelley, who simply goes by West, narrates the story. She’s almost fifty years old and navigating perimenopause. Frequently, she experiences an abundance of blood, which stains her sheets and bedding, but after visiting a gynecologist that offers solutions, West ignores those options, deciding to “protect” her uterus instead. Tucked insider her body, the organ means something to West, even though she had her tubes tied in her twenties and has never had a child, nor wanted one. Instead, West needs to stay on the road, interviewing the victims of a rapist/murderer for her upcoming true crime book.

While she’s had success in the past with her true crime books selling well, the thorny part is how people think about true crime: the lowest form of writing, trash for the illiterate, bottom-feeding authors who profit off of the misery of others. In comparison, West’s mom was a poet and her father a playwright, neither one famous while living. Tragically, West’s mother hanged herself a few months after West was born, too fragile or overwhelmed for motherhood after her husband (West’s father) abandoned her. Therefore, West is seen as an embarrassment to her treasured mother in particular, and, to some degree, her father. After her mother’s death, her father didn’t want her.

Despite being the true crime writer, West finds herself a victim when she starts getting notes tucked under her windshield wipers claiming that she is the mother of the note writer. Even as she crosses state lines, the notes continue to appear, and when West arrives in a small Colorado town where she grew up with her uncle (and surrogate father), she installs a security camera. The notes continue to appear, now held up by a person in a mask, and West’s security camera app alerts her to movement outside. Scary stuff. Alone because her uncle is on vacation, West tries to finish her current book project while playing detective for herself, barricading herself in the study.

Sarai Walker’s novel isn’t just a thriller or crime novel. Instead, Walker weaves in societal commentary about the value of childless women. For example, when considering a new book project, West is told she couldn’t possibly write about one serial killer because he murdered children, and if you don’t have children, you can’t understand the pain of the loss of a child. In the background, West’s uterus keeps bleeding, interestingly when she’s most distressed, as if the uterine blood were the evidence of herself as a future stab victim. On the other hand, West has viewed countless autopsy and crime photos for her work, and she is not numb to them. West laments:

I was often told “you wouldn’t understand” because I wasn’t a mom. You wouldn’t understand what it’s like to love unconditionally, you wouldn’t understand why school shootings are so heartbreaking, you wouldn’t understand why stopping climate change is so important, and so on. It was assumed that since I didn’t have a child, not only was I missing out on some key part of the human experience, but I was missing the essence of humanity itself.

I appreciated and identified with West in places, such as being told “you wouldn’t understand,” but also in the way West isn’t described as some kind of Clarice Starling of Silence of the Lambs or even Lucy Kincaid. Instead, West is a lot more like Plum from Dietland. I loved the food descriptions in the novel because they strike me as real, especially when West goes for Mt. Dew when stressed or eats gas station travel snacks without apologizing for it. Traveling is one of West’s favorite things: “There were no rules on the road. And being disconnected appealed to me; I liked lurking on the edge of the responsible adult lives everyone else seemed to be living, with their overnight chia oats and fake rice made from cauliflower. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a piece of fruit, unless Starburst counted.” West seriously just sounds like a regular American woman with no time for healthcare because life is overwhelming, an onslaught of hard situations.

Furthermore, I enjoy Walker’s writing style in Furious Violet. Sometimes, it’s made up of slangying terms, such as when West thinks, “I was tired of talking, analyzing, Jessica Fletchering.” And when it comes to descriptions, West does something I admire; rather than only describe non-white characters, she describes everyone, something so simple that I never see yet always want to see: “[LaRue] was in her seventies, a solid white woman wearing dark purple socks and a stretchy floral-patterned blouse…” But while much of the novel focuses on academics crazy about West’s dead poet mother, the novel feels contemporary, such as when West explains why her life in California has grown tedious, leading her to return to her uncle’s house in Colorado: “I was growing disillusioned with California full stop, with its environmental disasters, looming megaquake, and savage mix of rich and poor, exacerbated by my living in Beachwood Canyon, where the Porsches and Teslas zoomed past the elderly homeless woman who took a shit on the sidewalk outside the 76 gas station most mornings, she as much a fixture in the neighborhood as the Hollywood sign.” Notice the details of current climate change disasters, of homelessness pushed up against insane wealth — the current picture of America. Sarai Walker doesn’t turn away from crass language to capture these images.

Lastly, while much of the novel sounds like a thriller, all the academics out there will enjoy the inclusion of literary studies. The local college in Colorado has a professor whose life work is West’s mother, and soon after West arrives, a conference about West’s mother will take place. The attendees and presenters feel it’s West’s obligation to be there, to present on a mother she never met, and West rejects them forcefully, even researching whether three particular conference presenters may be the ones harassing her. It’s a bleak look at what fangirls/fanboys, even of the academic ilk, do for research, studies, and laying claim to some piece of literary history.

Overall, I loved Furious Violet and didn’t want to put it down. Sarai Walker can write one hell of a leading character, but she doesn’t make the plot about one thing. Questions about women’s post-partum mental health, who “owns” the rights to a famous dead person, whether we should tell victims’ stories, shame and rage, and the seriousness with which police take (or don’t) stalking women all swirl around in Furious Violet.