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 time–yet
she can’t 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. “How could anything that boring be
illegal?” she wonders. The scandal hits the press and
threatens to drain the Foys’ bank account, send Frank to
prison, and tear their family apart.
Frank claims that fudging the numbers is standard practice
in today’s go-go business atmosphere. Everyone does it, or
would if he could. Americans love recklessness, he insists.
They admire scalawags. Pat does too–at least in novels. And
it’s hard for Pat to imagine who has suffered from
LinkAge’s 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 doesn’t 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 Carey’s whip-smart and irresistibly sly novel
deftly portrays the dire costs of today’s corporate culture
of runaway greed–and 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.