The Cage

Book excerpt: “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.