When we catch up by phone with Andrea Bartz, the day before the release of her zeitgeisty new thriller, The Herd (Ballantine, March 24), she is sheltering in place in her studio apartment in Brooklyn.

“Gazing at me lovingly,” says Bartz, is Mona, a mostly white cat who stars on her owner’s Twitter and Instagram accounts and who is getting a lot of “quality time” at home during these dark, difficult days in hard-hit New York City, the U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus crisis. Cats, Bartz notes wryly, are the “real winners” of the pandemic lockdown.

These may be good times for Mona, but the deadly disease that has killed thousands has also dealt a blow to the publishing industry, along with countless other businesses. 

The planned bookstore tour for The Herd was canceled, and Bartz instead is doing virtual events (go to andreabartz.com) and learning how to use Zoom.

“It’s strange,” Bartz, 33, admits of publishing her new novel now, when many bookstores are closed. “But I’m excited and proud of it and hopefully it will still find the right readers.”

A self-described extrovert whose sideline as a freelance magazine travel writer also has been curtailed by the global crisis, Bartz remains upbeat and is keeping things in perspective.

“I’ve got my health, I’ve got my cat, and I’ve got supplies,” says Bartz, who arrived on the thriller scene last year with The Lost Night, a Brooklyn-hipster murder mystery starring a female antiheroine whose dodgy past includes blackout drinking binges. TV rights have been snapped up, with actress Mila Kunis set to produce. 

The Herd, Bartz’s second novel, is just the sort of hot-button escapism readers may be craving during these scary, disorienting times.

It’s set in an elite, women-only coworking space in Manhattan, where smart strivers meet, mingle, mentor, and maybe even commit murder. Bartz’s fictional shrine to female empowerment—modeled on trendy coworking spaces for women such as The Wing, The AllBright, and Luminary—is called The Herd.

Bartz loves to write mysteries set in “close-knit, closed-door” worlds, where, she says, she can be “the Virgil who ushers the reader through those closed doors and into a new social milieu.” She did it in The Lost Night, drawing on her days hitting the warehouse parties of hipster Bushwick during the 2009 financial crisis. And now in The Herd, she takes us inside an exclusive, “woke” world of competitive women that is as ripe for satire as it is for thriller chills.

She started with the idea for the setting and then, “I envisioned the logo out of nowhere, which made me laugh and still makes me laugh,” says Bartz. In the novel, she paints a picture of the “now-famous logo: THE HERD, the H-E-R a deep plum, the other letters gray.”

Shepherding The Herd is CEO Eleanor Walsh, the charismatic if intimidating entrepreneur who first made her name with The Gleam, “an ethically sourced cosmetics line.” Eleanor may remind readers of The Wing’s Audrey Gelman or Glossier’s Emily Weiss, or even Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, the now-defunct blood-testing technology company. 

Bartz demurs on real-life comparisons but says of Eleanor: “Some people think she’s a monster, some think she’s a totally sympathetic character, but I have a lot of love for her. For me, she’s her own powerful, enigmatic, ambitious, successful woman.”

When Eleanor disappears the evening she is set to make a major announcement about The Herd at a glitzy media event, her three closest friends face the maelstrom: Katie, a journalist who is surreptitiously writing a book about The Herd; Katie’s older sister, Hana, The Herd’s publicist; and Mikki, the space’s graphic designer. Adding to the intrigue is a nasty secret from the past these four young friends harbor.

Bartz, a fan of Gillian Flynn and Tana French, is happy to embrace the idea that she writes “feminist” thrillers (and with their emphasis on technology and social media, they could be dubbed “Millennial” thrillers as well). The feminist label doesn’t mean Bartz can’t be judge-y. 

As a guest at some of New York’s “utopian” female co-working spaces—where, she says, the “goal is to create space free from the male gaze”—Bartz found herself worried about her outfit, her hair, and makeup, and felt the need to “turn the charm up to 11” to impress other women. She uses that “interesting tension” and “internalized misogyny” to great effect in The Herd.

The busy Bartz has finished a draft of her third novel, The Visitors, due out next year. It’s the story of what happens to two female best friends who cover their tracks after they kill a backpacker in self-defense in a foreign country. The writer, who is “so intrigued by the dark side of things,” describes it as a typical “Andrea Bartz thriller, one that asks the question: ‘How well do you know your closest friend?’ “

Just don’t expect an “Andrea Bartz thriller” about the pandemic from this cooped-up writer.

“It’s interesting,” Bartz says. “I’m friends with a lot of thriller writers. I know some who are just exploding with ideas for quarantine thrillers. It’s a perfect closed-door mystery; you can cross the thriller with pandemic fiction, so there is a ton of raw material right now. But for me personally, whenever I see other people moving into a genre, I run away from it. That’s my M.O.”

Nor will you find the ubiquitous “female thriller” buzz words Girl or Wife in a Bartz title.

“That was not going to happen for me, nope,” she says with a laugh. 

Jocelyn McClurg, former books editor at USA TODAY, is a freelance writer in New York.