A rare treat—deeply thoughtful, strikingly original, and powerfully dramatic.
Hoping for a big payday, the disgruntled personal assistant to a powerful hedge fund CEO organizes an ersatz kidnapping of an employee who doesn’t exist in Peters’ thriller.
Ronnie Hewitt has plenty of reasons for her angry grudge against capitalism: Her father, Robert, lost his job and pension during the tumultuous downturn of the 1990s and sunk into a depressive abyss. He died of heart failure when Ronnie was 15, and the insurance company denied her mother, Carlotta, the payout she deserved, claiming Robert had killed himself. Now, Carlotta languishes in a second-rate home for the elderly because Ronnie can’t afford a better one. She expresses her angry contempt for the system she despises, delicately but powerfully captured by the author, through art; she writes for an improvisational theater, Jubilee, that revels in the comic lampooning of the delusional grandeur of the privileged. Paradoxically, she also works in the beating heart of the very economy she loathes—Ronnie is the personal assistant to Barry Kestrel, the CEO of Boundary, a major hedge fund in New York City he founded 27 years ago. Ronnie has a plan to secure a financial windfall and take revenge on the robber barons of the world. She will stage a fake kidnapping of a Boundary employee, Martin Newman, who doesn’t even exist: She concocted him out of thin air and, with the help of her tech-savvy boyfriend, Alex, inserted his employee file into the company’s records. But even the most ingenious plan cannot account for every eventuality, and the conspiratorial couple begin to encounter a slew of unanticipated problems—not the least of which is that someone finds out about their grift, artfully assumes the identity of the nonexistent Martin Newman, and shows up looking for his cut.
The plot is uncommonly complicated, but it is a testament to the strength and clarity of Peters’ writing that the reader is never lost—this is a deeply tangled but not gratuitously convoluted tale. And it is strangely, even astonishingly, plausible, or least rendered so in the able hands of the author. Every character is so realistically drawn, so full of nuanced life, that the unpredictable swerves that occur later in the novel (some of which could even be seen as fantastical) read as entirely sound. At the heart of the book is Ronnie, a fascinatingly complex woman who despises the financial predators who feasted upon her family’s travails. In response to the charge from “Martin Newman” that she hates her own country, she responds: “We don’t hate this country… It’s scumbags like Kestrel we hate. In the crash when his company bottomed out, everybody lost. Except him of course. People like him are too big to fail. Now he’s gonna make a fortune selling his company while most people are out there still scraping by. We don’t hate America. We’re saving it.” This is a bewitching novel, bursting with insight, depth, and astonishing unpredictability.
A rare treat—deeply thoughtful, strikingly original, and powerfully dramatic.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9798986680538
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Henry Gray Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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