As I’ve said before, I’ve been a Katie Alender fan ever since I first stumbled into the eerie corridors of Bad Girls Don’t Die. Her books have a way of taking the familiar—teen angst, family shifts, new beginnings—and draping them in shadows until every corner feels suspect, every whisper a warning.

With Famous Last Words, Alender sets her stage in Hollywood, a place already steeped in illusion, and spins a story where every sequence feels deliberately placed, each page plotting its own heartbeat. Willa Cresky, a Connecticut teen still raw with grief, is uprooted to Los Angeles to live with her mother and stepfather, Jonathan, a well-known movie director. But Hollywood’s glamour hides something darker: a serial killer known as the Hollywood Killer, who stages his victims in uncanny reenactments of classic film murder scenes (Fans of The Evil Within 2 may find shades of Stefano Valentini lurking here—I certainly did).

The mansion where Willa now resides becomes a character in its own right. Oddities creep in like cracks in the walls: words scrawled across surfaces with no writer in sight, the drip-drip-drip of water echoing through empty halls, a ghostly sense that something—or someone—is trying to make itself known. It is in this atmosphere of quiet dread that Willa meets Marnie at school and, later, Wyatt, who is obsessed with the Hollywood Killer case. As the puzzle pieces begin to twist into strange shapes, Willa’s life veers from the ordinary to the uncanny.

There’s a particular weekend when Willa is left home alone, and it becomes a turning point: the shadows lengthen, the lines between imagination, haunting, and danger blur, and the sense that the killer may be closer than anyone dares to admit comes crashing in.

Famous Last Words is more than just a teen ghost story or a whodunit—it’s a reminder that things are rarely what they seem. The glamour of Hollywood can conceal rot. A charming smile can mask something sinister. And sometimes the most terrifying hauntings aren’t from the dead but from the living.

I devoured this novel with the same eager dread I reserve for late-night horror marathons. It’s atmospheric, unsettling, and layered with the kind of twists that make you second-guess every character. If you’re looking for a YA thriller that blends the supernatural with a murder mystery wrapped in cinematic sheen, Katie Alender delivers beautifully.

I highly recommend this one—just don’t read it home alone.