Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder by Brandi Bradley (EXCERPT)

I’m ngl, pretty privilege is real. I don’t speak just from personal experience, but from watching pre-Crystal Palace Ben Chilwell get consistently picked for Chelsea and England despite being clearly outclassed by nearly everyone around him (this is, admittedly, a very niche example.) So when this terrific queer title came across my desk, I knew I had to share it with you readers. Even more excitingly, I have an excerpt for you so you can get a taste of what’s inside!

When a young entrepreneur is killed, everyone in town points fingers at his neo-hippie, picture-perfect, miracle-manifesting, fitness influencer ex-girlfriend Gabbi – including the victim’s best friend Jenna. As detective Lindy D’Arnaud and her partner Boggs search for a motive, they begin to wonder if this is a case of jealousy turned violent or shady business dealings gone deadly sour.

Things aren’t much clearer in Lindy’s personal life. When her wife’s ex-boyfriend – and the sperm donor to their baby – decides to move back to town, she finds herself competing with him for her wife’s affection. Can the three of them truly be a postmodern family in Western Kentucky, where living as a queer person is already challenging enough?

Told through the shifting perspectives of Lindy, Gabbi and Jenna, Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder is a page-turner brimming with quick wit and juicy gossip. But don’t take my word for it, check out this excerpt — from Gabby’s occasionally incisive, occasionally completely oblivious perspective — for yourself!

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THE OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON
GABBI’S WEBSITE AND SOCIAL
MEDIA ACCOUNTS

Hello Friends,

First, I want to be clear about this… I didn’t kill Ethan.

It’s not my way, it’s not in my nature to kill anything. I’m the kind of person who scoops up spiders and releases them out into the wild. I never went hunting as a kid. I have never eaten deer meat. I don’t condone fur. So how could anyone think that I would do anything as insane as kill my boyfriend is beyond me.

I’m the kind of person who believes that everything is part of a bigger plan, and I don’t always get to control what happens, but my job is to make sure that I keep a high vibe frequency that will attract what I need to be in service of others.

And to be honest, that’s been a real struggle right now.

I loved Ethan. We were together off and on for a long time. We had a very passionate connection. He would walk into a room and all my hairs would stand on end; we had this electricity between us, and when we touched sometimes I thought I would burst into flames.

Y’all… It was hot.

And now he’s gone, and I don’t know how to process that. We had plans. We encouraged each other. When things were good, we boosted each other.

Ethan was one of those guys who really cared what other people thought about him. Heneeded to be taken care of, and if certain people didn’t approve of me, well, he would start pulling away.

I don’t know what their problem was. I knew that some people were jealous of me. I am aware of how I look. I work hard at it. I love going to the gym. If you love something, and it helps you look fit, then it’s the process more than the reward that is beneficial. And anyone else can do it. I am not special. So I don’t understand why anyone would be jealous of that. It’s not a scam. I make the time to go to the gym three hours a day. And I love it.

But let’s be real, y’all. You can’t be an attractive woman anymore without someone saying something about it. And it’s mostly women. You’d be amazed at the things that people think they can say to me – you must be lucky, you must have a high metabolism, you must be blessed, you have too much time on your hands or what’s worse, you must be on drugs, you must have an eating disorder, you must have had plastic surgery. Have a chip and live! Like to my face and on my social profiles. It’s ridiculous.

And when they tell me these things, I just smile, because I know they’re struggling.

But none of that makes me a murderer. I loved Ethan.

As a result of the toxic messages I have been receiving online, I’m taking a step back. Under the advice of my attorney, this will be the last I have to say about the subject. My fitness coaching website, GabbiFixMe.com, will not be updated, but you can still peruse the archives for meal planning, grocery store checklists, fitness videos, gym strategies, and fitness calendars – all downloadable PDFs.

I have no reason to be defensive or scared about the outcome of this trial. As Celeste Sullivan says, “Outcomes are irrelevant.” I know the Universe is looking out for me, and the outcome will be what it is intended to be.

I am not scared because I have told the truth. There’s nothing else to talk about.

GABBI

Here’s what you need to know about Kentucky girls—they’re all princesses.

I’m not talking about being rich, because Lord knows, they’re not. These princesses will spend money they do not have to buy new boots, they will expect their parents to take out a loan so they can drive a new Lexus, and they will expect all men to fall head over heels in love with them. Every woman I have met who has been raised in Kentucky has two things in common: they believe deep down in their heart of hearts that they will get whatever it is they want and they believe they know everything.

This is not a judgment. When we pass judgment, we separate ourselves from love. And I did love these girls. I grew up with these girls. But I also recognize who they are. Princesses.

My first encounter with a Kentucky princess was in college. My roommate was from a tiny town in Northern Kentucky outside Cincinnati. She was city, as my mama would say. She grew up in the suburbs, thought all the tobacco barns on the drive down were “quaint” and owned every fragrance that Bath and Body Works produced that season. Our room smelled like “Sweater Weather” all the time.

She didn’t work, she didn’t go to class, and she cried every time a boy said he was going to call and didn’t.

She was a princess.

And I realized that I was surrounded by them. The girls across the hall who came to college together and scheduled all their classes around Days of Our Lives. The girl down the hall whose boyfriend’s parents paid for her cell phone. The girl in my class who “borrowed” her grandfather’s handicapped parking permit so she would always get a space close to the building. Princesses held positions of power in their sorority, ran for student council, and were named editors of the newspaper. And not because they had to fight tooth and nail for it, but because they knew it would be theirs. Their daddy or mama said they could have it, and they believed they could.

If ever in any situation they did not get the thing they desired, they would pivot and proclaim, “I never really wanted that anyway.”

I didn’t understand how they got there. What kind of parents did they have to create the level of self-esteem these girls possessed to assume that the world revolved around them?

But the most princess of all the princesses was Briana. Briana was not much to look at. She had delicate features on a squat body. Her skin was so fair that she was practically see-through. While the rest of us were all getting fake baked, she shone as white as the moon. Briana carried herself in a way that announced that she was not to be trifled with. She deployed all the tools in the princess handbook to ensure she got her way: flattery, cajoling, cooing, smiling, and eventually the cold shoulder. And sometimes, flat-out denial.

Once I mentioned that she had once dated someone I knew, and how he was heartbroken over the situation. She looked through me and said, “We never dated.” I was so confused. Not only had he told me that she was his girlfriend, but he once asked me to drop him at her dorm to meet her one night. She even flew with a group of us on a school trip—piggybacking on our group rate—and they had sat cozily together on the plane. But face to face with me, she declared, “We were only ever friends. We never dated. Like nothing ever happened between us.”

It took me a while to realize that all those gestures he made indicating how much he liked her—the texting, the drop-ins, the introducing her to his parents—in her princess mind, that’s how all people should treat her. With reverence. Everyone wanted to spend time with her. It didn’t mean she owed them anything.

And that’s how it went. I never once saw her without a boyfriend. She never once questioned how she would pay her rent. She never once uttered the phrase, “I want this, but I don’t know if I can afford it.” She would wrap a leash around her cat’s neck and walk it around her neighborhood like it was a dog, because why not. On the rare instances that she was feeling a little low, she would test drive new cars because she wanted to spend the day with salesmen flattering her.

What was intriguing was how she never demanded anything. She would decide that she wanted something and then patiently waited for someone to make sure it happened for her. She wanted a boyfriend, she got a fiancé. She wanted a house after they married—because no crummy apartment life for her—they immediately bought a house. She wanted a job—she got three offers. Briana returned to the community that raised her and purchased a nice house near her parents where she started to have babies.

Because the problem with being a princess is you are still beholden to the kingdom. Princesses are taken care of. Their parents were paying their bills, so they had to follow their rules. And despite the fact that many of them left home for college—like many princesses before them—eventually, they had to return home. They set up their own castles to rule their own tiny little kingdoms on the ends of culs de sac and farm roads to care for the retiring king and queens or to raise other little princes and princesses and repeat the pattern all over again.

Eventually, I realized that I didn’t want to be a princess. I wanted to be a queen.

And that’s when the real work began.

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From Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder by Brandi Bradley. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission.

Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder by Brandi Bradley will be published tomorrow March 14 2025 by Rumor Mill Press and is available from all good booksellers, including