As Long As She Lives

Thank you to Storm Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own. As Long As She Lives landed on shelves august 17, 2026. 🔎

The premise (spoiler-free)

Carissa Withers, the Black Widow of Berkeley, has two months left on death row. Six husbands dead. And now she says there were others, and she'll only tell Margot Phalen about them.

Margot interviews killers for a living, coaxing cold cases and missing girls out of people who enjoy being asked. She is also the daughter of a serial killer, which is either exactly why she's so good at this or exactly why she shouldn't be doing it at all. Meanwhile, kill kits are turning up across the country, including one uncomfortably close to her own front door, and a phone call from her brother sends her to Phoenix for a family matter she can't outrun.

What worked

The suspicion. It builds so consistently that by the halfway mark I didn't trust a single person on the page, including the ones I liked. Wiley writes multiple perspectives and uses them properly: you're never quite standing where you thought you were, and every chapter break hands you one more reason to squint at someone.

And Margot is a genuinely relatable main character, which is a strange thing to say about a woman whose father is a serial killer. Her family history isn't backstory here, it's the whole engine: how much of him is in her, how much of her is her own, and whether the thing that makes her extraordinary at her job is the same thing she's been running from her entire life. That nature-versus-nurture wrestling match is the best writing in the book.

If you like getting into the heads of people who do terrible things, and if you quietly believe you'd make a decent criminal profiler, this delivers.

Also worth saying: it reads perfectly well as a standalone. I never felt locked out of anything.

What didn't land

Here's my honest problem: this felt like the build-up to the real mystery rather than the mystery itself. There's a difference between a slow burn and a long runway, and for me this landed closer to the runway. So much is being carefully positioned, beautifully and patiently, and then the book ends before the thing it was positioning for actually arrives.

And that ending. Calling it a cliffhanger is generous. It's a chasm hanger. I closed it genuinely annoyed, which I suppose is its own kind of compliment. So hey! Kate Wiley, you've got my attention and yes, I'm scooting to the edge of my seat!

About the series

One thing worth knowing before you start: there are two Margot Phalen runs, and this is the newer one. Margot Phalen FBI picks her up as a special agent whose speciality is sitting across a table from incarcerated killers and coaxing out the cold cases and missing girls nobody else could reach, a gift she has precisely because she grew up as a serial killer's daughter. It opened in february with Tell Me Her Name, where the case that matters most turns out to be her own partner's arrest, then The Wolf at the Door in may, with seven sets of remains surfacing along the Appalachian Trail. As Long As She Lives is the third.

tap a cover to start at the beginning ♡

If you want even more Margot, there's an earlier Detective Margot Phalen series too: five books, starting with The Killer's Daughter. You don't need either to follow this one, but reading the FBI books in order will make that chasm hanger hurt in the right way.