Last Night Was Killer by Mary Pauline Lowry: Dead Bodies, Pole Dancing, and the World’s Most Helpful Friend Group
- genredpodcast
- 17 hours ago
- 9 min read
A dead man in the trunk. A pole dancing class full of extremely useful new friends. An ATF agent who is inconveniently hot. And one woman who decides that solving a murder herself is somehow preferable to simply calling the police.
We have things to say.
This week on Genre’d, we’re talking about Last Night Was Killer by Mary Pauline Lowry, a funny, wintry murder mystery that somehow combines grief, amateur sleuthing, found family, romance, white nationalists, Botox, snowmobiles, and a frozen corpse affectionately referred to as a “mansicle.”
Yes. All of that happens in one book.
And somehow? It works.
🚨 Spoiler Warning
The first part of the episode is spoiler-free, so you can listen even if Last Night Was Killer is still sitting on your TBR.
Once you hear the spoiler alarm, all bets are off.
We get into the identity of the dead man, how he actually died, the bigger criminal conspiracy, Tilly and Nate’s relationship, and some truly incredible decisions involving a children’s playhouse.
Consider yourself warned.
So, What Is Last Night Was Killer About?
Tilly Turner’s life has seen better days.
Her stand-up comedy career collapsed after the comedian she was opening for became the center of a #MeToo scandal.
She moved back to Boise with her twin daughters. Her mother died. She’s been furloughed from her waitressing job.
Things are going GREAT.
Looking for something resembling joy, Tilly’s neighbor Emmylou signs her up for a beginner pole dancing class.
Tilly goes.
Tilly makes friends.
Tilly goes drinking with those friends.
Tilly wakes up with absolutely no memory of what happened the night before.
And then she finds a dead man in the trunk of her car.
Naturally, instead of going directly to the police like a sensible person, she decides she needs to figure out what happened herself.
We support women’s rights.
We also support women’s very questionable decisions when they make for an entertaining mystery.
A Cozy Mystery for People Who Want Their Cozy Mysteries Slightly Unhinged
Katy loves an amateur sleuth.
So the second Tilly found a corpse in her Impala and decided she personally needed to investigate it, we were in familiar territory.
But Last Night Was Killer isn’t your traditional cozy mystery.
There is no inherited bakery.
No charming seaside bookshop.
No idyllic English village where people are inexplicably murdered every six weeks.
Instead, Tilly has moved back into her late mother’s house in Boise with two children, no comedy career, very little money, and one extremely inconvenient dead body.
And yet the book still manages to feel cozy.
A lot of that comes from the humor, the friendships, and the increasingly ridiculous group of people willing to help Tilly without asking nearly enough questions.
The Pole Virgins Might Be the Greatest Amateur Detective Agency Ever Assembled
The real stars of this book might be the women Tilly meets in her beginner pole dancing
class.
After their first class, the group goes to a strip club together, drinks far too much, adopts pole alter egos, and accidentally becomes involved in a murder investigation.
Normal friendship activities.
There’s Layna, who becomes Tilly’s partner in crime almost immediately.
There’s Gucci, who conveniently has forensic training.
There’s Zhang Xiu, whose connection to the victim becomes much more important later.
And then there are Emmylou and Oat Wilhelmina, two older women who prove there is apparently no age limit on being ride-or-die.
The found family element ended up being one of our favorite parts of the book. Tilly starts the story believing she has lost almost everything that defined her life.
By the end, she’s accidentally built an entirely new community.
It just happens to be a community that is unusually comfortable with evidence tampering.
Tilly Turner Is Going Through It
Underneath the comedy, Last Night Was Killer is also a story about grief and identity.
Tilly spent years thinking of herself as a comedian.
Then her career disappears.
She moves home.
Her mother dies.
And suddenly she has no idea who she is supposed to be anymore.
Her mother had believed in Tilly’s career so much that she repeatedly mortgaged the family home to help Tilly stay in Los Angeles, pursue comedy, and eventually become a mother on her own.
Finding that out after her mother’s death leaves Tilly carrying an enormous amount of guilt.
The murder mystery gives the book momentum, but Tilly figuring out what she wants her life to look like now gives it heart.
And Yes, There Is Romance
Enter Agent Nate Duran.
Hot ATF agent.
Uncle to one of Tilly’s daughter’s classmates.
Soccer coach.
Immediately charmed by Tilly.
Extremely willing to get ice cream with children.
We approve.
The romance stays firmly in B-plot territory, which worked for us. This is Tilly’s story first, and the mystery stays at the center.
But Nate gives the book just enough romantic tension to make things even more fun. Especially when Tilly briefly becomes convinced that he might also be the anonymous sperm donor who fathered her twins.
Because apparently finding a corpse in your car was not enough plot for this woman.
What It Was Giving
For Katy, this was giving Good Girls.
Not because Tilly and her friends suddenly decide to become drug dealers, but because it has that same feeling of women making increasingly questionable decisions while getting themselves tangled in a criminal situation that keeps getting bigger.
For Elyse, it brought back memories of Serial Killer Games, especially in the way the book plays with mystery conventions and repeatedly makes you think you know where the story is headed before swerving somewhere else.
The biggest difference?
Last Night Was Killer is much more overtly comedic.
This book knows exactly how ridiculous some of these situations are.
And it commits.
🚨 SPOILERS AHEAD 🚨
Seriously.
We are about to explain exactly how Connor ended up dead.
So… Who Actually Killed Connor?
This might be our favorite twist in the entire book.
Basically?
Everyone.
Except Tilly.
Connor, the dead man in Tilly’s trunk, turns out to be a white nationalist who had become an informant for the ATF after getting caught.
He is not exactly beloved.
Throughout the night, multiple women separately have encounters with him.
First, Salma Hayek hits him in the head with a bottle.
Then Zhang Xiu recognizes him as the man who drugged and sexually assaulted her daughter years earlier. She injects him with an enormous amount of Botox that happens to be available in the car.
Then Miranda, Tilly’s high school frenemy, encounters Connor while he is stumbling around near Tilly’s open trunk. Thinking he is attacking her, she pushes him into the car and stabs him in the leg with crafting scissors.
Then she closes the trunk.
Each individual injury might not have killed him.
Together?
Goodbye, Connor.
Tilly spends the entire book thinking she may somehow be responsible for this man’s death when she is arguably the only woman involved who did not hurt him.
We love an efficient plot twist.
Justice Against Creeps: A Theme
Connor is not the only terrible man getting his comeuppance.
Gucci has a professor who has been using his position to pressure female students into inappropriate situations under the guise of “extra credit.”
While Tilly and Gucci are secretly using the university lab to analyze evidence from Connor’s body, the professor arrives with another student and starts making advances.
So Tilly pops out of hiding, pretends she works for the university administration, and tells him to report himself the next morning or she’ll do it for him.
And he does.
Beautiful.
As Elyse put it, there is a definite theme running through this book:
Justice against creeps.
Sometimes that justice involves losing your job.
Sometimes it involves Botox.
The Mansicle
We cannot talk about this book without talking about the mansicle.
Because Boise is absolutely freezing, Tilly and Layna decide the children’s outdoor playhouse is essentially one giant freezer. Perfect place to temporarily store a corpse.
Obviously.
Until the ATF tracks Connor’s phone to Tilly’s house. Tilly is convinced they are seconds away from discovering the dead man in her backyard.
Except…
The body is gone.
Enter Emmylou and Oat Wilhelmina.
These two women discover Connor’s frozen body, ask approximately zero follow-up questions, move him into Oat Wilhelmina’s pottery kiln, and cremate him.
No body.
No evidence.
Friendship.
If helping someone destroy a body doesn’t bring two people closer together, we don’t know what will.
Miranda’s Mom Is WHAT?
Meanwhile, Tilly’s investigation keeps pulling her toward a larger criminal operation that Connor had been helping the ATF investigate.
And eventually we learn that the person running the whole thing is…
Miranda’s mother.
The prim, judgmental woman who has spent years criticizing her daughter is secretly a crime boss.
Elyse called this one.
Katy did not.
But once she appears at a dive bar with the exact people Tilly has been investigating, the pieces start falling into place.
This book truly did look at the phrase “there’s a lot going on” and say, “You have no idea.”
Nate Is Not the Sperm Donor, Thank God
One of our favorite subverted tropes happens with Nate.
Tilly notices that Nate has the same unusually shaped birthmark as one of her daughters and briefly becomes convinced that he could be their anonymous sperm donor.
And listen.
We would have accepted it.
But it would have been absolutely insane.
Thankfully, he is not.
And we liked that choice so much more.
Because it means Tilly and Nate aren’t together because some ridiculous biological coincidence has forced them into becoming a family. They choose each other.
Nate already cares about Tilly’s daughters. He’s already involved in their lives. He already fits. He doesn’t need to secretly be their father for the relationship to matter.
Much cuter.
Much less bonkers.
Scene Stealer: Little Sister
During one of Tilly’s amateur investigations, she discovers Connor’s pit bull has been left alone without food or water.
Obviously she cannot leave the dog.
So now, in addition to a murder investigation, Tilly has acquired a pit bull.
Her daughters immediately fall in love with the dog and name him Little Sister.
Yes.
Him.
Watching everyone scream “Little Sister!” at a poorly trained male pit bull was one of our favorite recurring jokes in the book.
And Little Sister ultimately proves extremely useful.
As all good accidental pets should.
Scene Stealer: Tilly’s Comeback
The ending also gives Tilly something we desperately wanted for her: a way back into comedy.
Throughout the book, she starts writing again.
Eventually she builds a comedy set around her experiences with pole dancing and performs it at a festival with professional pole dancers performing behind her.
The set gets posted online.
Then someone bigger shares it.
Then someone else shares it.
And suddenly Tilly is viral.
Her Substack takes off.
Her following explodes.
And eventually she gets offered a Netflix special.
It’s ridiculous.
It’s also surprisingly believable in the very specific way things can suddenly explode online.
And most importantly, success doesn’t mean Tilly has to return to Los Angeles and recreate her old life.
She gets to stay in Boise.
She gets to keep the family she has built.
She gets to pay off her mother’s mortgages.
And she gets to become a comedian again on her own terms.
We loved that.
Final Ratings
Katy
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was exactly the kind of funny mystery Katy loves. It’s fast, genuinely humorous, slightly ridiculous, and filled with amateur sleuthing decisions she would absolutely like to believe she could make herself.
The mystery kept moving, the found family worked, and somehow all of the absurd plot points still felt grounded enough that the book never crossed into cheesy territory.
Perfect for anyone looking for a funny, cozy-ish mystery or a palate cleanser between heavier books.
Elyse
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The opening took a few chapters to click, particularly while the timeline was moving back and forth through Tilly’s missing night. But once everything settled into the investigation, Elyse was fully in.
The mystery was fun, the twists worked, the friendships were great, and the humor kept the darker parts from becoming too heavy.
Could this have been five stars if it hit at exactly the right time?
Honestly, yes.
Fast Facts
Book: Last Night Was Killer
Author: Mary Pauline Lowry
Genre: Mystery / Comedy / Contemporary Fiction
Our Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ from both hosts
Expect:
Amateur sleuth
Found family
Single mom FMC
Murder mystery
Pole dancing
Female friendship
Romantic subplot
Grief and starting over
Small-city setting
Criminal conspiracy
Extremely questionable investigative decisions
One unforgettable mansicle
Best for readers who want: A funny, fast mystery that feels cozy without being a traditional cozy mystery.
Next Up on Genre’d
Next week, we’re wrapping up summer with Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan.
A contemporary romance before we officially enter spooky season.
Because once September hits?
We have plans.
And opinions.
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Mini FAQ
Is Last Night Was Killer a cozy mystery?
It has many cozy mystery elements, including an amateur sleuth, a close-knit community, humor, and a mystery that never becomes overwhelmingly dark. However, the book is more adult and irreverent than a traditional cozy mystery.
Is Last Night Was Killer a romance?
There is a romantic subplot between Tilly and ATF agent Nate Duran, but the mystery and Tilly’s personal journey are the main focus of the story.
Is Last Night Was Killer funny?
Very. The humor is a major part of the book rather than being limited to one comic-relief character. Much of the mystery is deliberately absurd and campy.
What are the main themes in Last Night Was Killer?
The book explores grief, female friendship, found family, rebuilding your identity after failure, motherhood, starting over, and allowing yourself to imagine a different version of your life.
Is Last Night Was Killer a good fall or winter read?
Yes. The Boise winter setting, snow, freezing temperatures, and generally cozy atmosphere make it a particularly fun cold-weather mystery.
Who should read Last Night Was Killer?
Readers who like funny mysteries, amateur sleuths, found family, unconventional heroines, romantic subplots, and books that balance genuinely emotional themes with completely ridiculous situations will probably have a very good time with this one.
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