I have been eagerly awaiting Abbott’s latest, and it didn’t disappoint! This is a story of money and of sisterhood. As a sister myself, I could feel the rivalries and love on display between Pam, Debra and Harper bone-deep. As always with Abbott, the prose is luscious - made to be savoured - and the twists & turns are as compelling as the characters. For me, the teenaged Vivian was my favourite, and one of the most “real” teenagers I’ve read in a while. Just as real is the sense of place - I now really want to visit Grosse Pointe…!

Three sisters who had been brought up in a wealthy environment now find themself in need of money.
They are invited to join a pyramid scheme investment club to make money fast.
Unfortunately this scheme has its pitfalls and is not what they had been counting on.
A mystery thriller about greed and betrayal.
Thank you to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group UK for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

I liked parts of this book, but it got too dramatic and I stopped caring.

It was good at showing rich sisters who lost their money. They're broke now. One's divorced, one has huge medical bills, and one has secret debt. They find a "get rich quick" plan.

The book was great at showing how families fight and love. It also showed how Detroit changed when the car industry crashed. It's about middle-class people struggling, not poor, but not rich either. It shows how hard it is for women who never had to worry about money. I felt bad for them.

But then it turned into a murder mystery. Everyone was a suspect. It felt weird and I didn't believe it. I wish it stayed about money problems, not murder.

My current clientele are all looking for books with no political bias or cultural issues. They are looking for an escape from today.’s climate and at my bookstore things with no political influence are selling far better.

The idea of the Wheel gripped me, the sisters too had their thrall, but the writing didn’t make sense to me. It felt quite jarring at times and so the book ended up becoming a slog.

The narrative about Detroit and it’s motor trade was in-depth and very true to life but this book fell down on the human element for me.

There's much I liked about this book but I guess it just took too melodramatic a turn and didn't quite carry me along to the end.

What Abbott does excellently is offer up a sympathetic portrait of the three Bishop sisters who had been born into wealth and privilege which had then been lost when their high-flying motor industry father had lost his position during the financial crisis. Now, as adults, they're still struggling with money: Pam's husband has followed in her father's footsteps and divorce has left her embittered and desperate; Debra is piling up a million dollar medical bill as her husband is battling cancer and each chemo session has to be paid for along with all the drugs; and Harper has her own secret debt that can't be revealed to her sisters. Enter The Wheel - a tax-free scheme to make money without having to do a thing...

The complicated relationships between the sisters and wider family are excellently drawn here: the jealousies, the bonds, the things that are unspoken, the love and the life-long resentments. The background of Detroit is also vividly sketched in, not least the reliance on the motor industry and the boom years for the likes of Chrysler and GM - followed by the bust. This is middle-class scraping the barrel: not downright poverty but the grind of not being able to pay the children's university fees, of a constant scrabble to keep up appearances, and that terror of mounting medical bills. Abbott is especially attentive to the effects on middle-aged women, that group who never assumed they would have to balance a budget, who might never have worked between college and a 'good' marriage - now left adrift and unresourced. To the credit of this book, I entered into a sense of empathy with these women with less judgement than I might have expected.

But where this book went off the rails for me was when it got turned into a murder mystery: suddenly everyone's a suspect and the minutiae of alibis and motives felt like too much of a disjunction with the character-led story that came before. Did I really believe the red herrings and trailing of motives? No - no, I didn't - and at that point the book and I parted company. I wish Abbott had stayed with the dark focus on the corruption of money without going quite as far as this did.

Thanks to Little Brown/Virago for an ARC via NetGalley

This book is all over the place. I read a few chapters and it was all over the place. Writing seems weird. Can’t finish it. Just not anything there for my interest.