Best Offer Wins

Marisa Kashino's darkly comic debut takes the anxieties of the modern housing market and pushes them to their unnerving extreme. Margo Miyake is a thirty-seven-year-old publicist worn down by eighteen months and eleven lost bidding wars in the overheated suburbs of Washington, DC. Convinced that the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian is holding their whole life hostage -- their marriage, their plans for a baby, their sense of having arrived -- she becomes fixated on one perfect house in one perfect neighborhood, tipped to come up for sale within the month.

Determined to buy it before it ever hits the open market, Margo sets out to win over its owners. A little discreet surveillance, a bit of trespassing, a growing intimacy with the sellers and their lives: each transgression feels justified, and each one leads to the next. As her schemes spiral from ambitious to unhinged, the reader is pulled into the uncomfortable position of rooting for her anyway.

Sharp, propulsive, and genuinely funny, Best Offer Wins is both a page-turning suspense novel and a satire of class, ambition, and the American dream of homeownership. Named among ELLE's and BookRiot's best thrillers of the year, it announces Kashino as a distinctive new voice in domestic suspense.