BEST OFFER WINS

A desperate woman devises a killer strategy for snagging the home of her dreams.

After losing 11 bidding wars, Margo Miyake goes full-on Fatal Attraction in a knockout debut novel that sets the pace for domestic suspense set in the world of competitive home-buying. Margo, 37, isn’t even close to achieving her life goals, namely having a baby—she’s struggling with infertility—and buying a seven-figure home in a tony suburb of Washington, D.C. When she discovers that the perfect house will soon go up for sale, she decides she’ll get her hands on the place before it hits the market—no matter what. If that means infiltrating the lives of the current owners, then lying and blackmailing her way to closing the deal, she’s braced for battle. Fueled by nuclear-hot rage and frustration, Margo becomes the walking, talking nightmare the owners never saw coming, and neither do the people she uses and throws away in order to buy that house. Author Kashino, a longtime journalist who covered the real estate market for the Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine, has created in Margo a character as vicious and conniving as the jilted lover played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The novel is wonderfully inventive, and readers will marvel at the workings of Margo’s devious mind as she claws her way into a brick colonial-style home whose wide-plank oak floors and Carrara marble countertops she’s ready to kill for. Behind the closed doors of the perfect dream home, Kashino paints a gimlet-eyed portrait of the allure of status and the greed for material wealth that turns at least one woman into a predatory monster.

Deliciously dark and twistedly funny.