The Business Trip

Two women sit beside each other on a flight and never speak. Stephanie Monroe is a divorced television producer from Madison, Wisconsin, flying to a conference in San Diego. Jasmine Littleton works at a dive bar and has slipped out of her boyfriend's trailer in the dead of night to escape an abusive relationship. On the surface, they have nothing in common.

Then both women drop out of their own lives. Days later, each sends her friends the same startling message: she has run off with a man named Trent McCarthy. The texts keep coming, but they grow stranger, colder, more erratic — until they stop altogether. As the people who love them grow frightened, both women are declared missing, and one question consumes everyone left behind: who is Trent McCarthy, and what exactly happened on these trips?

Told through a chorus of voices — friends, coworkers, and family piecing the story together from the outside — Jessie Garcia's debut is a twisty, propulsive psychological thriller. It withholds and reveals in careful measure, keeping the reader guessing about who is the predator, who is the prey, and who might be playing everyone.