While the concept here was great, unfortunately the execution didn't rise to it. There was way too much going on between the mystery and the romance and the podcast and meta-fanfiction plot, and none of it was sufficiently developed to ultimately be satisfying. (And also if you've spent a lot of time in fandom, you too may find the way the characters talk about it like a primer and still get things wrong to be really annoying! Like just to give a couple of examples, a) that is NOT what head canon means, you mean fanon, and b) the characters keep saying the fanfiction in question is supposed to be really good and then the writing in the fanfiction excerpts is just so mediocre at best.)

As for Sam and Bex, the setup and dynamic between them is very similar to Katie and Wil in EVERYONE I KISSED SINCE YOU GOT FAMOUS by the same authors under the name Mae Marvel, but those characters and relationship are so much more developed and that book significantly better edited. I was hoping that BIG NAME FAN would be more similar to the authors' Mae Marvel title because I love sapphic celebrity romance (eg. K.E. Lane's indie classic AND PLAYING THE ROLE OF HERSELF), and a serial-numbers-filed-off RPF based on the premise of actresses on a procedural with a huge fandom that ships them falling in love IRL would've been amazing. Or even just the former plus a solid mystery--podcast and all--but sans the fandom-adjacent angle might have worked... but as it is, BIG NAME FAN bit off more than it could chew, and ended up a frustrating read for me because it had the potential to be so much more successful if it had just tried to do fewer things but do them better.

I loved the idea for this, but I didn't feel it was super well written. There was no real tension between Bex and Sam, so there was nothing really keeping them apart and they didn't have any palpable chemistry. The murder was also one of the main suspects very early on, so there wasn't any big plot twist or any real mystery to the mystery. This could have been great, but it needed a few more rounds of developmental edits - as it is, it reads more like a first draft.

While I really enjoyed the characters, I felt like the actual mystery was fairly lacking here and that the rest of the story suffered from it. I think the character development was full and smart, but I read a *lot* of mysteries and this one just didn’t hit, and I think it cost the characters and relationships to be slotted in around the mystery. It seems like this may be the start of a mystery series and I will absolutely read a second one, and I’m hopeful that maybe the characters will have more room to expand if they are not so deeply involved with the mystery.