The crime
From the dust jacket:

Growing up in rural New Jersey, Ashley and Carolyn were inseparable, but as teenagers they began to drift apart. Carolyn ended up at Columbia University, and Ashley moved to Los Angeles, where her vibrant beauty became an entrée into a world of never-ending parties.

When Ashley visited Carolyn in New York, however, she revealed darker secrets that didn’t quite fit the golden lifestyle Carolyn had imagined. Then, at the age of twenty-two, Ashley was found brutally murdered at her home in Hollywood.

The Hot One is the story of Carolyn’s emotional quest to find out what really happened to her oldest friend.

The story
Woof, where to start here. The Hot One: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex, and Murder is flawed in its inception, and I don’t know if I can get at how, but before I talk through it, let me say that Murnick can write. The prose is effective, elegant at times. I was about to type, “That’s not the issue,” but now that I’m looking at it, that perhaps is the issue — that this isn’t, didn’t need to be, a book. That because Murnick has the prose chops, it became a book, and because it’s a crimoir, Simon & Schuster wanted said book, but it isn’t one. It’s a monograph or a Medium piece.