Dez Lane is a thrift-store fashion obsessive with big ambitions and no connections. She doesn't particularly like Patrick Ruskin—the entitled youngest son of a wealthy dynasty—but she likes his mother, Marie Caulfield-Ruskin, the powerful editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine, who could hand Dez the fashion career she has been unable to earn on her own. So when Patrick invites her to his family's Easter reunion at their private island estate, Dez swallows her pride and says yes.
The Ruskins' island is a monument to obscene wealth, staffed by servants bound by contracts that amount to lifelong servitude. But once the last ferry departs and the family is gathered, the weekend curdles into something far darker. The staff, pushed past their breaking point by decades of cruelty, have decided that the only way out is to make sure none of the Ruskins ever leave the island alive.
Trapped between the family she came to impress and the servants she instinctively understands, Dez must decide where her loyalties lie—and how far she is willing to go to survive. A savage, blood-soaked social horror in the vein of The Menu and Ready or Not, Guillotine is a standalone novel from New York Times bestselling author Delilah S. Dawson.