Good Intentions

Good Intentions is Marisa Walz's debut novel, published in February 2026. It is a darkly comic suspense story about grief that curdles into obsession.

Cady runs a successful luxury event-planning business, is with the man she has loved since she was seventeen, and keeps a social calendar she can barely maintain. She also has Dana, her identical twin and closest confidante. When Dana dies suddenly, before Cady can say goodbye, the life she built stops holding together.

What alarms Cady's family is not that she is grieving but what she is grieving toward. In the hospital waiting room on the day Dana died, she met Morgan, a mother mourning a loss of her own, and it is Morgan — not Dana — who takes up all the space in Cady's head. Her attention to this stranger's life escalates step by reasonable-seeming step.

The novel stays close to Cady's justifications, which is the point: it is about the moral gray zone people wander into after something unbearable, and how far a person will go while still believing their motives are good.