I Keep Searching For Lifetime Thrillers On Netflix, And Now We All Have To Suffer

By Robert Scucci
| Updated 18 seconds ago

If you were to ask me what The Book Club Murders was about, I’d probably eat my own hand before taking a deep breath and calmly asking you to read the title again. The spoiler is right there: there are a bunch of murders happening, and the book club at the center of the affected community has something to do with it. It’s a bunch of middle-aged Mean Girls trying to figure out why all their loved ones are getting slaughtered, but nobody is self-aware enough to have a conversation without getting interrupted right before they have the opportunity to say the thing that will clear their name or point investigators in the right direction.

The movie starts with a fire, allusions to a missing persons case, and then introduces us to our major players, who all live in homes that are either clearly sound stages built specifically for Lifetime movies or look like they’re staged for an open house at any given moment because real estate prices in 2024 are just that great.

The film score gives you exactly the kind of sonic shorthand you need (cue the sinister sounding strings) while you’re spoon-fed conflict that lacks any real mystery or ambiguity until the final 20 minutes, where the twist ending comes out of nowhere and doesn’t feel earned so much as tacked on when somebody realized this thing needed to wrap up in 87 minutes (why are all Lifetime movies the exact same length?).

Everything is just a little too convenient in The Book Club Murders, but I can’t stop watching these movies because I’m a writer, and sometimes the best lesson you can learn is how not to make a psychological thriller.

A Dead Dad, A Missing Girl, And A Poison Pen

The Book Club Murders introduces us to inoffensive and conventionally attractive mother-daughter duo Natalie (Brittany Underwood) and Gwen (Eva Igo) Johnston, who are browsing at Back Forty Books, owned by Wendy Novak (Ainsley Burch). Both Natalie and Gwen are established as homebodies because of the recent tragedy they faced when their house was set ablaze, killing Gwen’s father and Natalie’s husband.

Through a not-so-subtle use of Chekhov’s gun, we’re also clued into the disappearance of troubled teenager Lauren McClain (Julia Zook), who briefly lived with the Johnstons before the fire and hasn’t been seen since. Gwen urges Natalie to join Wendy’s book club so she can have the house to herself one night a week, allowing her to hang out with her boyfriend Tony Chandler (Aaron Goehle), who just so happens to be the son of Detective Chandler (Mike Bredon), who’s married to Sadie Chandler (Nicole Weber), a mainstay at Wendy’s book club.

Now that every character (most of them, anyway; you don’t need to know about anybody else, trust me) is established in The Book Club Murders, the book club murders can finally kick off. The women learn about a series of poison pen letters, written anonymously, that are plaguing their community, often alluding to personal information that nobody else in the group should have access to while also letting them know who the next victim will be.

One by one, people start dropping like flies while their dark secrets are exposed. When Natalie opens her mail, she comes across two different parcels that make things interesting (not really): a life insurance payout for $500,000 because of the fire that claimed her husband, and a letter in its signature black envelope with a red wax seal addressed to Gwen that she quietly hides away in a drawer.

Detective Chandler, who suspects Gwen and Natalie of being involved in both the house fire and Lauren’s disappearance, doesn’t want Gwen seeing his son anymore. Meanwhile, Sadie, who’s made it very clear to Gwen that she’ll ruin her life if she keeps poking around, does whatever she can to drag the mother and daughter through the mud, almost as if she’s hiding something herself. 

This World Is Too Small

Another pattern I’ve noticed while burning through these Lifetime movies is just how small the worlds they exist in actually are. It’s always somebody dating somebody close to the case, and they’re not to be trusted because of what another person who just happened to be at the same location happened to observe. Everybody talks to everybody else, and when the ongoing murder mystery turns into a retroactive investigation of the house fire and Lauren’s mysterious ability to vanish without a trace, everybody has something to say and generally knows where everybody is, stripping this already lackluster mystery of whatever thrills it had left.

Everybody is also so painfully stupid in this context, and the small world gets even smaller when Wendy calls multiple women to her bookstore after hours to show them something she wouldn’t dare divulge over the phone. Of course, multiple parties show up at the same time a new body does, but you saw this coming from a mile away and shouldn’t be surprised at this point, right? Right?!

The Book Club Murders is fun for a quick laugh while you’re doing something more meaningful with your time in the background. If there’s ever a kind of movie you throw on while folding laundry so you don’t miss anything worth watching, while simultaneously keeping yourself from ruminating on the horrors of the world because there are enough pretty colors moving across the screen of your moving picture box, it’s this one.

And I think this is the only kind of situation where you should actively seek out titles like The Book Club Murders on Netflix. As a general rule of thumb, if a movie has no critical score, audience score, or Wikipedia page, it’s probably not very noteworthy. Tubi already has all the good movies that fit this description.

THE BOOK CLUB MURDERS SCORE