revenge is crazy
Ellie had it all. She was an accountant at a prestigious company founded by her father. She was married to the love of her life. She was young and healthy and rich. But not everything is as it seems.
Ellie has been struggling with sleepwalking. She’s been anxious and exhausted, and in her vulnerability she had an emotional affair. Jack has stuck by her, but her affair has made him distant. However, he’s still there with her each day, as she wakes up in random rooms of their apartment, as she wakes up with various bruises, even as she woke up with the stove on fire. She’s worried. When she was a child, her mother had a breakdown and had been committed to a mental hospital. Ellie can’t help but wonder if that’s what’s happening to her as well.
But then she gets a mysterious invitation to a secret society. It’s a group of women who band together to help each other. They tell her about a college professor who had assaulted a young woman. That woman, a daughter to one of the other society members, had not been able to recover and took her own life. The professor suffered no consequences. They were asking Ellie to help see him come to justice. Although she was unsure at first, she finally agreed to meet with the professor.
Ellie goes on a couple of dates with the professor, and he reveals his true colors, giving Ellie and the Society all the evidence they need against him. And then Ellie gets her next task. She’s not sure she’s doing the right thing, but she decides to push forward. But then she is assigned to take down a powerful man she has personal ties to, and her whole life starts to unravel.
With the help of a friend who lives nearby, Aubrey, Ellie tries to figure out what’s going on around her. But then, she finds Aubrey with her husband, and Ellie doesn’t know who she can trust. But she does know this: she needs to figure it out quickly, or she could very well end up just like her mother.
Society Women is part domestic thriller, part revenge story, with a strong sprinkling of secret society vibes. It may start out a little slow, but once the secrets start coming out, there is no stopping this story. I thought I knew what this story would be, but then it took a turn, and another, and another. I was questioning who was really telling the truth until the end. I could not stop reading this book until I got all the answers, and I loved that. Society Women is a crazy ride, but it’s worth the ticket.
Egalleys for Society Women were provided by Harper Perennial through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine, and I enjoyed the book so much I bought the Kindle version.
