Bantam
Published August 12, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Three women, Dylan, Isabel, and Priya, are certain their friend Beck was assaulted and murdered by a womanizing cop whose colleagues are protecting him. When he stops by the bar where Dylan works and comes onto her, she’s furious and frustrated. It’s at that moment that she resolves to do something about it: Peter Miles has to die.
The three friends have a standing date to get together, drink wine, and watch an undemanding movie. This time, though, Dylan has a different plan. She tells her friends Peter Miles is stopping by her bar regularly, and it’s time to make sure he pays for what he did before he kills another woman. They need to work as a team so they can get away with his murder. The real challenge is keeping it together afterward, when the tension frays at their friendship and they begin to wonder how close they really are.
The story is told from the perspectives of the three friends: Dylan the bartender, Priya a nurse, and Isabel who is a graduate student. Over the course of the story, their essential characteristics – bold and decisive, troubled and skeptical, timid and fearful- are challenged and undergo change. A fourth character, Bree, enters the story and becomes instrumental in understanding what actually happened to Beck, and a nameless fifth one speaks from five years in the future, from a prison cell. In addition to the close observation of relationships under strain, distrust picking apart the threads that once held them together, the suspense comes from wondering who it is who is speaking from behind bars.
There are some aspects of the plot that aren’t entirely convincing. The three friends are absolutely certain Peter Miles is guilty, though the case is circumstantial at best. They never seem to entertain the thought that they might be targeting the wrong suspect. It’s not entirely clear how three women with such different backgrounds became so close. And while the story is set in the panhandle of Texas in the 1990s, there’s not much that anchors it in that cultural and geographic space. It could be happening almost anywhere.
That said, it’s a compelling story with a noir sensibility flavored with touches of feminism. It turns the standard mystery on its head by having the protagonists take on the role of killer, the mystery being how they will avoid being caught. As a variation on the rape-revenge horror film trope, it raises twin emotions in conflict – that an outrage has occurred and justice must be served, but taking the task on outside the bounds of the system carries a moral cost. The main characters are nicely tested as the toll of their actions begins to wear away at their relationships and self-image. The pace is swift enough, the stakes high enough, that even with imperfections it makes for an entertaining thriller.