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A Novel
by Bonnie Kistler
A dazzling thriller about a young woman whose fabulously wealthy mother might be the victim of an elaborate con or might be losing her mind – and the daughter can't tell where the truth lies.
Julie's mother Kate is a force of nature – a glamorous woman of seventy, a self-made real estate developer, a grande dame in Florida society, and a power broker in Florida politics. It wasn't easy for Julie to grow up in the shadow of such a dynamo, but she loves her mother, and she and her husband Eric are thrilled when Kate marries her long-lost high school sweetheart, a salt-of-the-earth man named Charlie.
But their storybook romance ends abruptly. On their wedding night, Kate calls the police in hysterics to report that Charlie just confessed to a notorious unsolved crime from decades before.
Charlie says she imagined it. Eric says that Kate has dementia. And the FBI says that Charlie couldn't possibly have committed that crime.
Julie doesn't know what to believe. Is her brilliant mother losing her mind? Or is sweet, lovable Charlie gaslighting Kate to gain control of her fortune?
As Julie tries to navigate through this maze of paranoia and mind games, cracks start to develop in her own marriage as it seems that Eric is keeping secrets ...
Set against a backdrop of rampant development and devastating climate change, Shell Games is a psychological thriller that will make your head spin and the pages turn as you wonder exactly who is doing what to whom.
"Un-put-downable ... .Kistler masterfully keeps the action thrumming with a series of subtle ground-shifts that force readers to recalculate everyone's motives. The narrative never veers into implausibility as the misdeeds and double-crossings stack up, resulting in the rare page-turner that doesn't deflate in its final act. This will keep readers up all night." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A truly spectacular psychological thriller with a dazzling mystery at its core. Shell Games is the ultimate one-sitting read that has everything—incredible family dynamics, characters that burst off the page and a premise so deliciously enticing and surprising that the pages quite simply turn themselves. Bonnie Kistler is a genius!" —Matthew Blake, internationally bestselling author of Anna O
"Packed with secrets and surprises, Shell Games is a twisty page-turner that will keep you guessing until the very end! Using her experience as a lawyer, Bonnie Kistler has infused her latest thriller with intriguing legal quagmires and counter-tactics. The result is a thoroughly engaging read featuring a glamorous-but-flawed family tangled in the perils of wealth, power, and deception. You'll want to stay up late reading "just one more chapter." —Toni Halleen, author of The Surrogate
This information about Shell Games was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bonnie Kistler is the author of The Cage and Her, Too. A former Philadelphia trial lawyer, she was born in Pennsylvania and educated at Bryn Mawr College and the University of the Pennsylvania Law School. She and her husband now live in southwest Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.
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