Pat Foy leads a charmed life. She has a close-knit family, an expensive home, and a satisfying career as a landscape designer. She also reads mystery novels all the timeβyet she canβt see what is happening right in front of her eyes, and is astonished when her husband, Frank, is arrested for accounting fraud at LinkAge, the huge telecommunications firm that employs him. βHow could anything that boring be illegal?β she wonders. The scandal hits the press and threatens to drain the Foysβ bank account, send Frank to prison, and tear their family apart.
Frank claims that fudging the numbers is standard practice in todayβs go-go business atmosphere. Everyone does it, or would if he could. Americans love recklessness, he insists. They admire scalawags. Pat does tooβat least in novels. And itβs hard for Pat to imagine who has suffered from LinkAgeβs bankruptcy. So she decides to search out the victims, and finds more than she bargained for. At first she thinks that all she has to do to make amends is whip out her checkbook. What she doesnβt know is that events have already begun to spin out of control, and that the future holds as many twists and turns as any of the whodunits she has read.
Jacqueline Careyβs whip-smart and irresistibly sly novel deftly portrays the dire costs of todayβs corporate culture of runaway greedβand brings to life a fractured landscape filled with CEOs-turned-robber barons, privileged lives punctured by wretched excess, and personal relationships put to the ultimate test.
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