This book started off sloooow! If you like slow burns, this is definitely your book. The first half of it took me a couple days, because I had a hard time getting gripped by it. Thankfully, the second half sped up and I finished it in a couple hours.
Kelly is our protagonist. She’s a go-getter, a lawyer with a perfect win record, and a great family. Her husband (for no reason that was extremely relevant to the book) is in a coma, and when she isn’t working, she’s at home taking care of him.
Her work leads us to meet Dr. George Benedict: a potential Nobel Prize candidate and the man who discovered that Alzheimer’s Disease was caused by a virus. He is poised to release a vaccine for the cruel disease, and rid the world of it. His work in the field makes him very well-respected, but he’s a sexual predator.
Kelly knows this, but also doesn’t want to lose her status as the lawyer who doesn’t lose, so she defends men like this. She justifies it by giving the women relatively meager settlements, and by the fact that she’s taking care of her family with the money she makes. Even when Kelly herself is raped by Dr. Benedict, she immediately washes away the evidence and continues forward with helping men during the “Me, Too” movement. If the world found out, she’d be seen for the hypocritical and insensitive woman that she is (did I mention she’s a rather unlikeable character?).
In what can only be described as a harebrained scheme, she eventually gets together with three of the women she screwed over with settlements and NDAs, and they all set out for revenge. Problem is, Kelly is a slightly unreliable character who doesn’t always think things through, so we will just say… things go awry.
The initial slowness of this book and how much I disliked the main character definitely affect my rating on this one. The writing was good, the ending was clever, but nothing ever made my jaw drop. I really struggled on the rating for this, but I’m going with 3.5, rounded down because I think it was a good book, but I don’t think I’d read it again.
(Thank you to Harper Perennial & Paperbacks, Bonnie Kistler, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review. This book is slated to be released on July 4, 2023.)