Review: Motor City Love Song by Lisa Peers

Motor City Love Song by Lisa Peers

Blurb from Goodreads:

No one knows why the queen of indie rock vanished from the Detroit scene twenty years ago. Now, her ex-girlfriend is determined to track her down—and what she uncovers will change everything.

Detroit, 1997. At the Artemis Club, Paloma is chasing rock-and-roll stardom, with her girlfriend and manager Jace committed to making her a worldwide indie sensation. But when Paloma suddenly disappears from the public eye in 2001, Jace is left to pick up the pieces. 

Two decades later, Jace thought she’d left music for good. Yet when the Artemis Club is threatened, she commits to saving the venue even though she’ll have to track down Paloma, whose early-career hit just went viral. Paloma has her reasons for not wanting to be found, and Jace isn’t eager to reopen old wounds. Still, each keeps measuring her life against the love she lost. With the Artemis’s fate at stake, Jace and Paloma are pulled back into the scene they once ruled...and back toward each other. 

Told in two voices, this sapphic salute to Detroit’s garage band era shows that sometimes, the truth is the most powerful love song of all.

 After adoring this author's last novel, I was excited for this one.  Unfortunately, it felt a bit predictable and inauthentic. I liked the start of this but then it became a bit whiny.  You knew there was a secret but it was even more awful than I could imagine.  The ending was successful and satisfying but as for the rest -- hope you have better luck!

Motor City Love Song comes out next week on February 10 2026 and you can purchase HERE.  

The song screamed to a close, and the audience whistled and whooped. Paloma acknowledged the applause with a gap-toothed smile that struck Jace like a lightning bolt. From the first song through her entire set list and as her second encore concluded, Jace was in her thrall. It wasn't simply that Paloma was arrestingly lovely from every angle, which was a documentable fact. It was the effortless certainty of her playing, the soul-incinerating power of her vocal delivery, the deceptively simple lyrics that burrowed into Jace's brain and gut: what lazy rock journalists would call "star power."