I'm not a big mystery reader, but I have read Ruthie Knox romances before, and I like anything where fanfic plays a big role and isn't derided. In this story, fanfic plays a big part in the murder mystery. But an actress who reads and loves fanfic bringing fanfic to other actresses and reading it out loud to them? No, fanfic aficionados would never. Fans know not to do that, and actors hate that.

There is a lot here that needed to be streamlined. There were so many moving parts, between the romance, the mystery, the podcast, and all the characters and their histories, that it was hard to keep track of everything. The info-dumping was done in very clunky ways and in ways that people who have spent so much time together would never talk to each other (i.e. reminding them of a former colleague of theirs with their full name and job).

The romance is not front and centre here, which is fine, but it also relied on a lot of backstory that was never made clear or fully grounded, so the romance never really got out of first and it was simply a discussion that was never had until it was convenient for the story--and by then, the anticipation had long since worn off.

The book does have interesting things to say about queer-baiting in media and about how white cis men wield power, though I never believed that the men in power weren't paying attention to what was happening on the podcast when it might affect their reputations and/or bottom line--the podcast would have been reported on, even if they weren't listening directly.

I did eventually get invested in the story, but there's just way too much in general that doesn't really come together here for me.

I don’t really know how to categorise this book, nor do I know how I feel about it.

Let’s just say I wanted our mains to just get together already so we could focus on the mystery. I think I am mostly confused about the series, “flashbacks” and fan fiction mixed into this story and also elaborately told. I like the mains and the premise of the story, it just is a bit much with all these mixed lines.

"Big Name Fan" was not what I expected at all, and so it was an incredibly surprising read! It is fresh, it is heart-warming and even heart-breaking at times, with my heart being tugged at multiple times for multiple different reasons!

In this novel, Mare and Knox introduce us to Bex and Sam, two actresses who used to work together on a detective tv show until five years prior. The show ended abruptly after Sam left unexpectedly, and after a colleague died on set too. Sam and Bex's characters had an unexplored sapphic chemistry that fans loved, but never saw fulfilled. A lot of queerbaiting, as we all know it. Now, five years later, Bex is begging Sam to get on a podcast and a reunion episode, so that their fans can have some closure, and maybe they also can get some emotional closure out of it.

However, what starts out being a podcast reminiscing about their past on set quickly turns into a search for their "Big Name Fan", someone on their set who also created the most popular fanfictions in their fandom. Sam and Bex gets closer as each podcast episodes passes, but the revelations that come from the podcast and their amateur investigation threaten both of them very dangerously.

I really enjoyed the structure of the novel, and especially Bex's character. The authors really gave it all in making us understand the reasoning behind her choices, her motivations and her feelings. She is the emotional core of the story, her turmoil and regrets, her hopes and dreams for herself and her sister are what drive the story forward.
Bex and Sam's relationship is slow to kick into gears again, they've hurt each other in different ways, and despite having being really close once, they are cautions not to make the same mistakes again. Let me tell you, this book is a tv show I would watch and scream at the tv for. I totally get why fans of their fictional tv show made it an incredibly popular series.

This was an incredibly enjoyable read that blended romance and action, leaning on the latter a little more. I appreciated Bexley's character a lot, and the way the authors had her develop thanks also to the mystery that has unfolded on set.

Thank you to Kensington Publishing | Kensington and NetGalley for allowing me to read this!
I'm not sure if I wasn't the right reader for this but...
I am not the bet with names. Despite the book being told only in one point of view, I found myself mixing up Bex and Sam often, forgetting who our POV was, simply because they read so similarly (other than the internal monologue). If you'd asked me who dropped out to take care of their sisters, and who had... red? hair, seventy-five percent of the way through, I wouldn't be able to tell you.
I thought it felt very,,.. out of touch an slightly pretentious the way "vaping pen" (or was it "vape pen") was referenced, in that it's... just a vape.

The action seemed to flip-flop wildly-- sometimes, finding out what happened to Jen was more important, sometimes reading the fanfic and seeing the scenes was. As a fanfic reader myself, who was deep in the trenches (Swen you were ROBBED), I felt the discourse about what could and couldn't really been shown on TV felt.... fairly modern in terms of "why couldn't we do this", in exactly how different queerness in mainstream media was treated. There were no other references to even other queer shows, with only a passing reference to Gray's Anatomy, making it feel extremely disconnected from the source material the book wanted to be honoring.

Anyway, it felt... messy. I feel it could have been one-- murder mystery-- or another -- getting together after a show had ended. I'm not sure both fit. I was also not fully certain what ages were supposed to be-- implication seemed to be mid/late 20s, maybe even early 30s? but they read as teenagers.

I really enjoyed the characters. More mystery than romance which I wasn't expecting. A fun story that I would recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Publishing for the ARC

This was fun! What a cool concept. Two TV-detectives reunited for a TV-comeback when someone actually is murder and they need to solve it. In addition there's crazy chemistry between the two leads. Sapphic friends to strangers to lovers. a unique and entertaining mystery with a cute romance.

Thank you to NetGalley for this advance reader copy of this book. I appreciate what the novel was trying to do, but it was not my cup of tea.

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.