HarperCollins
Published July 28, 2026
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet
Sarai Walker’s breakout novel, Dietland, is a shock-humor-heist adventure that sees a fat-shamed agony aunt find herself as a member of a feminist terrorist cell that, some time before the Epstein Files were ever heard of, deals gruesome and hilarious vengeance to men who participate in rape culture and the PickMes who enable them. Dietland was a rant with a point: we are lucky that women’s action is not proportionate to their rage.
I was looking forward to her third novel, but it is a disappointment.
Furious Violet returns to the theme of feminism, and, unlike Dietland, is a generically standard mystery, with a Miss Marple-style amateur sleuth and family secrets that come home to roost. Like the heroine of Dietland, West (birthname: “Violet”) Shelley has a dysfunctional relationship with body, image, and food. Her body attacks her, gorily, with endometriosis; she fights back by feeding it a steady stream of sugar-powdered or neon-orange junk from vending machines and gas stations. She’s the opposite of the famous mother she never knew, an unholy mashup of Sylvia Plath and eighteenth-century Mary Wollstonecraft — the latter the mother of Mary Shelley, who is evoked by giving the protagonist her mother’s marital name, Shelley.
There are two evils in West’s life, besides her self-destructiveness: firstly, the serial rapist-murderers whom she profiles in her four bestselling true crime books, and secondly, more seriously from her point of view, “the Furies”–her and her uncle’s nickname for the cadre of feminist academics (or, more accurately, academic feminists) who have created a cult of her sainted dead mother and blame her for refusing to endorse it. To this cult, whose feminism is expressed in cliche dissertation titles, frumpy cardigans, and “artistic” eyeglasses, nothing is really at stake in feminism except, maybe, tenure at posh small liberal arts colleges.
The Plathlike poetess died in 1975, of suicide, of course, and the earliest scraps of academic feminist prose about her sound written in the early eighties. So does everything else the Furies say or write, as if neither feminism nor academia has made any meaningful progress or cultural intervention since then.
This bears no relation to the actual work being done by feminist scholars. For instance, some of my colleagues teaching English and Women’s and Gender Studies here in the Midwestern part of the Rust Belt are doing that in the prison system. Their courses taught behind the walls give women inmates much-needed escapes, autonomy-boosting skills, and perhaps a chance at transcendence of their grim surroundings and ability to critique the structures that shaped their lives.
In Walker’s tale, the victims of the Furies’ egotistical devastation include college students, such as the Mormon adoptee Kayla, who comes to West’s attention because she and her beloved best college friend murder her mother, who had barred them from being together while far away. (Yes, this is the well-known story of New Zealand girls Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, the latter of whom is now better known as the late crime novelist Anne Perry.) Other famously evil women who seem to inform the predictable story include a current media sensation, infanticidal Massachusetts madwoman Lindsay Clancy.
In Furious Violet, West finds herself stalked by someone claiming to be her mother. Is this her latest vanished serial-killer research subject, performing a gender inversion a la Buffalo Bill? Is it one or more of the Furies? Could it even be her supposedly dead mother? The elusive stalker predictably proves the MacGuffin that enables West to confront her relatives, associates, and internal demons. The solution to the mystery is so predictable I initially thought it would turn out to be a red herring. West proves an unreliable narrator, but not in a way that makes any narrative sense. In the end, as Mary Shelley and Sylvia Plath suggested, women are lauded as divine mothers, demonized as monsters when we fail at divinity, and this situation is infuriating.