A man in a well-cut suit walks into a roadside diner near Indio, California, and a blond woman at the register cannot get the cap off the mustard. She asks for his help, the bottle goes off like a firework across his lapel, and in the flurry of apologies, salt water and napkins, his jacket comes off and goes back on again a few seconds lighter. His wallet ends up on the dashboard of a rusting 1968 Bronco that the two women won in a game. It holds seventeen dollars. The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid opens on that small, funny theft, and within a few pages it has shown you everything it cares about: one woman who can read anyone, one who can only be herself, and the money that never quite stretches.

Who Really Runs the Last Days of Vic & Coco

Victoria Lucchese is one of the best pool players in the country, and nobody can know it. Six years ago Colette Wilson walked into a Detroit bar and found her running the table in a stained shirt, making every man in the room furious, and since then they have worked a simple routine. Coco plays the loud drunk who insists her friend can beat anyone, Vic plays the shy friend who only knows a little, and some man who wants to feel generous loses a hundred dollars. If Vic wins too beautifully, men get violent. If she plays just well enough, they decide she got lucky. Reid makes that bind the emotional engine of the book, and the scene in which Vic finally explodes about it in the truck is among the best things she has written.

Coco is the brain of the outfit, and she lies about everything, including her age. Reid gives her a pay phone and a secret in the very first chapter: the feds have picked up her trail, and she needs a score big enough to leave the country. Vic does not know. The novel alternates close third-person chapters between them, and Coco’s are often only a paragraph or two, terse confessions she will not make out loud. It is a clever piece of construction. You know more than Vic does, but never as much as Coco, and The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid plays that gap like a hustler would.

Vic is the reason the book has a heart. She left school after sixth grade, taught herself from library encyclopedias and carries her facts around like loose change: why icebergs look blue, how the retina flips the world. Each night she wedges a chair under the motel doorknob. When the pair settle in Canyonville, Arizona, and Coco talks Roman Maclean, an old flame with a ranch house and a reputation, into staking Vic at sixty-forty in his favour, Vic gets something she has never had: permission to play as well as she can. The match against Roman’s ringer, a sullen giant billed as the Tucson Tornado, is thrilling even if you cannot tell a bank shot from a break.

The Card Mechanic and the Last Days of Vic & Coco

The counterweight to the partnership is Tony, a green-eyed card cheat who clocks the women’s routine in a Nevada bar and keeps turning up. He is dealing a crooked game for a local operator called Eddie, and his courtship of Vic is a running argument between two professional liars about whether either can be trusted. The banter is quick and the attraction is played straight, and The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid is honest that the danger is not Tony himself but what he represents: a door marked ordinary life.

Reid surrounds that temptation with a town that keeps offering Vic a home. Leona at the Desert Willow motel bakes for her guests. Louie, who runs the diner, pays for pool lessons by losing and wants Vic to humiliate his rich cousin Neil. Vic asks him for a waitressing job just to feel needed. Every kindness tightens the knot in The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid, because Coco’s plan depends on leaving. Underneath it all runs Nixon’s last summer, and the headlines suggest the whole country is working an angle.

Where It Gives Ground

• The middle circles one question. Through much of the third part, Vic and Coco, Vic and Tony, and Vic and herself rehearse the same dilemma about staying or going. Several of those conversations could be folded together without losing anything. A tighter edit of The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid would lose a few chapters and nothing else.
• The villains arrive by convenience. The forces closing in on the women are thinly drawn for most of the book, and the connections between them surface late and all at once. For a novel about reading people, its antagonists are oddly hard to see coming, and not in a good way.
• Part Two pumps the brakes. Right after the momentum of the opening, Reid steps back into two long backstories. They are moving, one of them devastating, but the switch will test readers who came for the caper.

Read These Next

1. Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid for another woman who is the best in the room and is punished for showing it.
2. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus for a brilliant woman underestimated by a whole decade of men.
3. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis, the classic novel about a girl genius at a board, and her hunger for it.
4. The Hustler by Walter Tevis for the original pool-room story of talent, stakes and the men who bankroll them.
5. A Literary Analysis of The Grapes of Wrath, which Vic once read in a library, if you want the older story of Route 66.

For every title in order, see our guide to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books.

About Taylor Jenkins Reid

Reid was born in 1983, studied media at Emerson College and worked in film casting in Los Angeles before her first novel, Forever, Interrupted, came out in 2013. The author note calls this her tenth novel, and The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid trades her usual Los Angeles glamour for desert motels.

• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017) built the word-of-mouth readership she still writes for.
• Daisy Jones and The Six won the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award in 2020 and became an Amazon miniseries in 2023.
• One True Loves reached cinemas as a film the same year.
• Atmosphere (2025) sent her to Houston for months to research NASA’s shuttle era.
• The audiobook of this one has a four-voice cast: Julia Whelan, Jennifer Beals, Edoardo Ballerini and Danny Burstein.

The Last Word

The pool is the bait, and the friendship is the hook. The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid is at its best in a sweaty Arizona bar at one in the morning, when Vic calls every shot of a nine-ball rack out loud and Coco looks at her as if she invented the game. The book takes too long in its middle, and its bad men are mostly scenery. But the two women at its centre will stay with you, arguing in the front seat of that Bronco with Coco’s feet on the dash.

This review was written from an advance copy, and the finished text may differ. The Last Days of Vic & Coco by Taylor Jenkins Reid is out on 2 March 2027 from Atria Books. Rack them up.