DON’T BE LIKE THAT

King knows how to open a book. The FBI battering down the door on the first page, the antique desk broken 'into firewood,' the phone yanked away as 'evidence' — this is a hook built for readers who want the wronged-Wall-Street-wife premise (think The Undoing by way of Big Little Lies) and it delivers immediately, with no throat-clearing.

What elevates it past a straight thriller pitch is Leslie herself. She's drawn with a consistent, specific temperament: furious, funny, and instinctively generous under pressure. The jail-cell detour with Diamond/Christine could have been filler, but it's actually the book's best scene — Leslie, in prison sweats and rage, still negotiates a stranger's exit from a trafficking situation ('Because I stabbed my husband. I'm not real high on men right now') and it reads as character, not plot mechanics. Her line to the FBI agent — 'FBI, IRS, I'd like to buy a vowel' — is the kind of deflective gallows humor that makes a protagonist feel lived-in rather than assembled.

The prose itself is uneven — exposition-heavy dialogue, some clichéd interiority ('the ache in her chest felt like an anvil') — but the hook and the voice are strong enough to carry a reader past that, which is exactly what this genre asks for. This is a book that knows its premise and its protagonist, and leans into both.