Lady X Has Female Rage, Revenge and a Taylor Swift Connection

The author of Lady X has said Taylor Swift’s “Vigilante Shit” helped inspire the book, which was enough information for me to immediately want to read it.

Because if you know the song, you know the energy. A woman gets wronged, decides she is done sitting around feeling bad about it, and starts plotting. Give me female rage, revenge, family secrets, and women taking justice into their own hands, and I am listening.

And that is very much the world of Lady X.

What is Lady X about?

Lady X is a suspense novel told across two timelines: Los Angeles in 2024 and New York City in 1977.

In the present-day story, we meet Margot Cooper, whose A-list actor husband has become involved in a very public scandal. Margot heads back to her childhood home, where she finds old papers and newspaper clippings in the attic connected to a mysterious vigilante known as Lady X.

Then we jump to New York in 1977, where a group of women begins taking justice into their own hands after the system fails one of them.

That is about as much as I think you should know going in, because a big part of the fun is figuring out how those two timelines connect. And yes, they very much connect.

So how Taylor Swift-y is this book?

If you picked up Lady X because you heard about the “Vigilante Shit” connection, do not go looking for Taylor Swift Easter eggs hidden on every other page.

Nobody is leaving behind a red scarf. There is no secret 13 situation happening. You do not need to start analyzing chapter numbers.

The connection is much more about the emotional energy of the song: revenge, female anger, reclaiming power, and what happens when women who have been wronged decide they are done playing by everyone else’s rules.

That is where I felt the Taylor Swift inspiration the most.

There’s a mystery buried in the past

At the center of the story is the legend of Lady X, a mysterious female vigilante operating in 1970s New York.

Decades later, Margot starts realizing her own family may somehow be connected to that legend. Suddenly you want answers to all the obvious questions: Who was Lady X? What happened back then? How much of the story has changed after being passed around for more than 40 years?

I love a mystery where something buried in the past starts clawing its way into the present, so this part worked really well for me.

The dual timeline took me a minute

Dual timelines do this to me all the time.

I’ll finally get invested in one storyline, and then suddenly we are somewhere else, in another decade, with another set of problems. I’m sitting there thinking, wait, come back! I had questions!

Then I get invested in that timeline, and we switch again.

It took me a little while to feel equally locked into both sides of Lady X, but once I did, the structure started working much better for me.

The 1977 sections were especially interesting because you are watching the Lady X legend form in real time. Meanwhile, in 2024, you are trying to figure out which parts of that legend are true, what has changed over the years, and why Margot’s family seems to be tangled up in it.

As you get closer to the end, you can feel the two stories moving toward each other, which is where I became much more invested.

Justice gets a little complicated

Underneath the mystery, Lady X is also playing with some bigger questions.

What happens when the institutions that are supposed to protect women fail them? What happens when nobody believes you? And at what point does getting justice turn into getting revenge?

Taking justice into your own hands can sound extremely satisfying when you are reading about terrible people getting what they deserve. Sometimes you are reading a thriller thinking, “Yes, queen, commit the felony.”

Then consequences show up.

Lady X plays with that tension between wanting these women to fight back and wondering how far they can go before things become something else entirely. It never turns into a super-heavy examination of vigilante justice because we are still here for a suspense novel, but there is enough underneath the mystery to give you something to think about beyond figuring out who did what.

The ending did what I needed it to do

I will stay far away from spoilers here, but both timelines eventually come full circle.

That matters a lot to me with dual-timeline books because if I spend hundreds of pages bouncing between two time periods, I need the ending to show me why both stories belonged there.

Lady X does that.

There are reveals and connections, and things that happened decades earlier change how you understand what is happening in the present. I finished the book feeling very satisfied with how everything came together.

Who should read Lady X?

I think this one will work especially well for you if you like revenge stories, female-centered suspense, dual timelines, family secrets, urban legends, mysteries from the past resurfacing in the present, and morally complicated characters.

Also, women deciding the justice system could perhaps use a little freelance assistance.

And if the Taylor Swift connection is what brought you here, ask yourself whether you love the themes behind “Vigilante Shit.” If revenge, female rage, reclaiming your power, and getting even are your favorite parts of that song, I can absolutely see you enjoying what Lady X is doing.

For me, those female rage and revenge elements made the story much more interesting than a standard family-secret thriller.

I gave Lady X four stars. Click here to get it at a local bookstore of your choice.

If you could choose one Taylor Swift song to inspire a thriller or mystery novel, which one are you picking?

I feel like “No Body, No Crime” is sitting right there waiting. Taylor already wrote half the plot for us.