First published 2022
On a hot August morning in 1922, Jay Gatsby is found shot dead in his swimming pool at West Egg. Police call it murder-suicide and point to George Wilson, a mechanic found dead in the woods nearby. Then a diamond hairpin turns up in the bushes, and suddenly three women are under suspicion. Daisy Buchanan loved Gatsby once, long before a family tragedy pushed her into marriage with the unfaithful Tom. Jordan Baker, Daisy's closest friend, has spent years hiding a secret that already cost her a golf career and could now destroy the friendship she depends on. Catherine McCoy has fought hard for women's rights and harder still to protect her sister Myrtle from a suffocating marriage to George Wilson. Each woman's story reaches back years before that August day, tracing the choices and losses that pulled all three of them into Gatsby's orbit. Jillian Cantor builds toward the question each of them carries: how much did she know, and what did she do about it?
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, crime
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, intimate, literary, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: hidden-secrets, multiple-perspectives, mystery-unraveling, unreliable-narrator
Setting: West Egg, New York
Period: 1922, 1920s, Jazz Age
368 pages · Paperback · Harper Perennial
Content warnings: death, domestic-violence, murder