Nicole Mueller is struggling. She had been top of her class at Yale Law School, and she had been given an offer to a prestigious New York law firm. She had been fast-tracked to partner, but last year one of her clients had folded. She lost an important customer and lots of billable hours. Now her career is fast-tracked to nowhere, and she is put on notice by her mentor that if things don’t change for her, she may be asked to leave the firm.
Nicole’s husband Dan is also a lawyer but works as in-house counsel for a bank. He doesn’t have the crazy hours or the need for clients to bill, so while he makes less money, he has less stress. And they live in a large apartment that belongs to his aunt, who gives them a discount on the rent. But when his aunt passes away and his mother and sister let them know that they have designs on the apartment, Dan and Nicole know they need to find a new place to live, quickly.
One day, Nicole’s phone buzzes with an email. “Please Join Us,” the header says. It’s an invitation to an exclusive women’s networking group. The invitation was for a week at a dude ranch in Colorado, a chance for her to get out of Manhattan and bond with other successful women for friendship as well as personal and professional enrichment. She decides to go, justifying the time away from the office and the expense by telling herself that it will pay off with its own rewards, and hopefully some wealthy new friends in need of legal counsel.
Even before she gets to Colorado, when she’s on the plane remembering how nervous flying makes her, she meets her first fellow member. Congresswoman and former model Athena is sitting nearby and offers Nicole medication (which she refuses) and friendly conversation (which she gratefully accepts) to distract her during the flight.
At the ranch, Nicole meets the leaders of the group, former singer Michelle and businesswoman Karma. They had both reached international fame with their careers, and now they want to give back, offering strong women the chance to rise through the ranks of their careers with the kinds of networks and favors that men generally saved for themselves, so they created the group, Panthera Leo. The others at the ranch, besides Nicole and Athena, are another business owner, an actress, and woman whose financial know-how could make or break a company. They bond together through group and personal challenges, and by the end of the week the women are bonded and thinking of themselves as a Pride.
After the weeklong retreat, the women all go back to their lives, but the Pride meet together regularly to talk and support each other. And when Nicole finally opens up to them about her challenges at work and needing a new place to live, Connie steps up and offers not only one of the rental apartments she keeps in the city but also a new client who has been looking for new counsel. At the same time, however, there are demands from the others. A donation for a favorite charity, a signature for a petition needed by Athena, even a job for a young lawyer. The lawyer is from Harvard at least, but Nicole rankles at being asked to get involved with her firm’s hiring.
As Nicole gets deeper into the new case she was handed, she starts to have more and more questions about the group and its reach. At first, it seemed pretty harmless, just a way to connect to other powerful women. But as more is asked of her, she wonders just how far the Pride will go to get her to do what they want. And when The Test comes, and she’s asked to put her career and maybe even her freedom on the line, how far will Nicole go for the sake of the Pride? And if she does say no, will they use what they know about her to destroy her life?
Please Join Us is a twisty thriller from bestselling author Catherine McKenzie. It has a delicious cult flavor to it, with an element of menace that builds throughout the story. The book opens with the The Test, so that sense of imminent danger is strong right at the start, and then we head back to before Nicole knew about the group. Those stories unravel, intertwined, throughout, until after The Test, when Nicole has to decide what she really wants for her future.
I was really wanting to like this, but I was a little concerned about the culty idea. There is a lot that could go wrong using a cult-like group as the center of the story, but McKenzie navigates it all with ease and grace. I thought Please Join Us was as close to perfect a thriller as I’ve read recently. I was hooked in right away and never lost focus. I just wanted to keep reading, every single word, all the way to the end. Thriller fans will find a lot to love in this book, and a lot of fun surprises as well.
Egalleys for Please Join Us were provided by Atria Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but I also won a copy of the ARC through a Goodreads giveaway.
