A truly spectacular psychological thriller with a dazzling mystery at its core. Shell Games is the ultimate one-sitting read that has everything--incredible family dynamics, characters that burst off the page and a premise so deliciously enticing and surprising that the pages quite simply turn themselves. Bonnie Kistler is a genius!--Matthew Blake, author of Anna O
A brilliant page-turning thriller about a young woman whose fabulously wealthy mother might be the victim of an elaborate con or might be losing her mind--and the daughter can't tell where the truth lies.
Julie's mother Kate is a force of nature--a glamorous woman of seventy, a self-made real estate developer, a grande dame in Florida society, and a power broker in Florida politics. It wasn't easy for Julie to grow up in the shadow of such a dynamo, but she loves her mother, and she and her husband Eric are thrilled when Kate marries her long-lost high school sweetheart, a salt-of-the-earth man named Charlie.
But their storybook romance ends abruptly. On their wedding night, Kate calls the police in hysterics to report that Charlie just confessed to a notorious unsolved crime from decades before.
Charlie says she imagined it. Eric says that Kate has dementia. And the FBI says that Charlie couldn't possibly have committed that crime.
Julie doesn't know what to believe. Is her brilliant mother losing her mind? Or is sweet, lovable Charlie gaslighting Kate to gain control of her fortune?
As Julie tries to navigate through this maze of paranoia and mind games, cracks start to develop in her own marriage as it seems that Eric is keeping secrets . . .
Set against a backdrop of rampant development and devastating climate change, Shell Games is a psychological thriller that will make your head spin and the pages turn as you wonder exactly who is doing what to whom.
A delicious thrill-ride of breakneck twists and turns. . . . Evoking Grisham and Highsmith, Bonnie Kistler is a masterful plate-spinner of plot, deftly weaving together the worlds of fashion, high finance and white-shoe law to reveal their seamiest secrets and shared underbellies, all via characters who live, breathe, and scare the hell out of us on every page.--Cassidy Lucas, author of Santa Monica
An absolutely spellbinding thriller. . . . An utterly engrossing and thoroughly entertaining story.--Booklist (starred review)
Combining the propulsive narrative drive of The Firm with the psychological complexity of The Silent Patient, a gripping and original thriller about two professional women--colleagues at an international fashion conglomerate--who enter an elevator together . . . but only one is alive when they reach the ground floor.
On a cold, misty Sunday night, two women are alone in the offices of fashion conglomerate Claudine de Martineau International. One is the company's human resources director. Impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed, she sits at her desk and stares somberly out the window. Down the hall, her colleague, one of the company's lawyers, is buried under a pile of paperwork, frantically rushing to finish.
Leaving at the same time, the two women, each preoccupied by her own thoughts, enter the elevator that will take them down from the 30th floor.
When they arrive at the lobby, one of the women is dead. Was it murder or suicide?
An incredibly original novel that turns the office thriller on its head, The Cage is a wild ride that begins with a bang and picks up speed as it races to its dramatic end.
A delicious thrill-ride of breakneck twists and turns. . . . Evoking Grisham and Highsmith, Bonnie Kistler is a masterful plate-spinner of plot, deftly weaving together the worlds of fashion, high finance and white-shoe law to reveal their seamiest secrets and shared underbellies, all via characters who live, breathe, and scare the hell out of us on every page.--Cassidy Lucas, author of Santa Monica
An absolutely spellbinding thriller. . . . An utterly engrossing and thoroughly entertaining story.--Booklist (starred review)
Combining the propulsive narrative drive of The Firm with the psychological complexity of The Silent Patient, a gripping and original thriller about two professional women--colleagues at an international fashion conglomerate--who enter an elevator together . . . but only one is alive when they reach the ground floor.
On a cold, misty Sunday night, two women are alone in the offices of fashion conglomerate Claudine de Martineau International. One is the company's human resources director. Impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed, she sits at her desk and stares somberly out the window. Down the hall, her colleague, one of the company's lawyers, is buried under a pile of paperwork, frantically rushing to finish.
Leaving at the same time, the two women, each preoccupied by her own thoughts, enter the elevator that will take them down from the 30th floor.
When they arrive at the lobby, one of the women is dead. Was it murder or suicide?
An incredibly original novel that turns the office thriller on its head, The Cage is a wild ride that begins with a bang and picks up speed as it races to its dramatic end.