Dolly Wrote a Thriller and I Have Feelings About It

A girl runs to Nashville with a past and a demo tape

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one on paper. AnnieLee Keyes shows up in Nashville with a guitar, a stack of songs, and a past she will not talk about. She catches the ear of Ruthanna Ryder, an aging country legend who is basically Dolly if Dolly let herself be a little more haunted and a little more tired of the industry chewing her up. Ruthanna takes AnnieLee under her wing, launches her, and somewhere behind all of it is a man from AnnieLee’s old life who is coming to find her, and not to catch up over coffee.

I will say this plainly: the Nashville stuff is the best part of the book by a mile. You can feel Dolly’s fingerprints all over the scenes of songwriting, of open mic nights, of what it actually feels like to stand on a stage for the first time and realize a room full of strangers is listening to you. There’s a real texture to the music business details, the way labels chew up young writers, the way a song gets built line by line, the exhaustion of touring, that you don’t get from a ghostwritten celebrity thriller. That part isn’t padding. That part is the book working.

The thriller half is where I started skimming

Now here’s the thing. The mystery/thriller engine of this book, the guy chasing AnnieLee, the reveal of what she’s running from, the back half where it turns into an actual chase novel, is competent Patterson machinery and nothing more. Short chapters, punchy cliffhangers, a villain who shows up right on schedule. It reads fast. It also reads generic. I’ve read enough Patterson co-writes to recognize the seams, the places where you can feel two different books stitched together, one written by someone who has spent a lifetime inside the music industry and one written by the guy who has co-written approximately four hundred thrillers with a rotating cast of collaborators.

The reveal about AnnieLee’s past, when it lands, is fine. It’s sad, it’s meant to explain everything about her, and it does the job. But I didn’t gasp. I nodded. There’s a difference, and I think that difference is the whole review in one sentence.

I read most of this on a flight to Nashville, actually, which felt like cheating in the best way, like the book knew where I was going before I did. I had the audiobook queued up too at one point, narrated partly by Dolly herself reading Ruthanna’s chapters, and I’ll be honest, her voice carried scenes that would have been flat on the page. That’s not nothing. That’s a specific kind of magic you can’t fake.

Let me second guess myself for a second, because I think I’m being a little hard on this book. Is it possible I wanted “Dolly Parton’s Great American Novel” and what I got was “solid airport thriller with a Dolly-shaped heart,” and that’s actually fine, that’s actually what was advertised? Maybe. But I still think a book gets to be judged on what’s inside it, not on what I hoped would be inside it, and what’s inside it is a great first half and a serviceable second half that never quite catches up.

The album, by the way, might be the best part of the whole package. Dolly wrote original songs to go with the book’s plot points, and hearing “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans” after reading AnnieLee’s arrival in Nashville does something the prose alone doesn’t. This might be the first book I’ve ever reviewed where I’d tell you to buy the soundtrack with more enthusiasm than I’d tell you to buy the book. You can find the whole package, book and all, right here, and if you’re going to do one, do both.

The best parts of this book aren’t the mystery. They’re the songs underneath it.

About Dolly Parton and James Patterson

You know Dolly. Everyone knows Dolly. Coat of Many Colors, Dollywood, a woman who has been photographed in a bedazzled jumpsuit more times than most of us have been photographed period, and somehow still comes across as the most grounded person in any room she’s in. She didn’t need to write a novel. She wrote one anyway, because apparently there’s no format Dolly Parton looks at and thinks “not for me.”

James Patterson, meanwhile, is the co-writing machine that keeps American publishing running. He’s written with presidents, with fellow thriller writers, with basically anyone whose name will fit on a cover next to his, and the formula works often enough that you can’t fault him for running it back one more time. His job here is structure and pace. Dolly’s job is soul. You can feel the division of labor if you’re looking for it.

If you liked the Nashville parts more than the thriller parts, read these next

• Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, for the same “watching a career get built from nothing” high, done with more craft.
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, if you want the small-town-secret-in-your-past engine done with a defter hand.
• Dolly’s own Dream More, if what you actually want is Dolly’s real voice with no thriller plot bolted onto it.

For your book club

1. Which half of this book do you think is more “Dolly” and which half is more “Patterson”? Can you point to specific scenes?
2. Does Ruthanna Ryder feel like a real character to you, or like Dolly’s idealized self-portrait?
3. Did the reveal about AnnieLee’s past land for you emotionally, or did it feel like a plot mechanism?
4. Would this book work as well without the companion album, or is the multimedia package part of the point?
5. What does the book get right (or wrong) about how the music industry treats young women?