Synopsis:
Two wildly different women — one a grifter, the other an heiress — are brought together by the scam of a lifetime.
Nina once bought into the idea that her fancy liberal arts degree would lead to a fulfilling career in New York City. When that dream failed to materialize, she turned to stealing from rich kids in L.A alongside her wily Irish boyfriend, Lachlan. Nina learned from the best. Her mother was a con artist who hustled to give her daughter a decent childhood despite their unstable life.
But when her mom gets sick, Nina must put everything on the line to help her, even if it means running her most audacious, dangerous scam yet.
Vanessa is a privileged young heiress who longs to make her mark in the world. She has become an Instagram influencer — traveling the world, receiving free clothes and products, and posing for pictures in exotic locales. The lifestyle she depicts is the envy of her followers. But behind the façade, the reality is that her life has been marked by tragedy. So after a broken engagement, Vanessa retreats to her family’s sprawling mountain estate, Stonehaven, in beautiful Lake Tahoe. It’s a mansion filled with dark secrets — not just from Vanessa’s past, but also from the past of a lost and troubled girl named . . . Nina.
Nina, Vanessa, and Lachlan’s paths collide on the cold shores of the lake where their intertwined lives give way to a winter of aspiration and desire, duplicity and revenge, and two brilliant, damaged women try to survive the greatest game of deceit and destruction they will ever play.
Review:
Nina was raised by a single mother with big aspirations for her brilliant only child, but no motivation to settle down and earn an honest living. Instead, because her mother was pretty and knowledgeable about how to use her appearance, she pulled off con jobs that paid the rent for a time, always on the verge of a really big payday. When the marks got wise or the police began investigating, they moved on.
After college, Nina’s dreamed-of big career in the New York art world never became a reality. So when she learned her mother was alone in Los Angeles, stricken with cancer and in need of expensive treatment not covered by insurance, Nina gave up her job as a third assistant to an interior designer who specializing in redecorating luxurious vacation homes in the Hamptons. Now she’s in Los Angeles, running scams with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Lachlan, a charming Irishman. Nina has an M.O. “I watch and I wait. I study what people have, and where they have it. It’s easy because they show me. Their social media accounts are like windows into their worlds that they’ve flung open, begging me to peer inside and take inventory.” She strikes when the time is right, adhering to a code of conduct. “Don’t take too much; don’t get greedy. Take only what won’t be missed. And only steal from those who can afford it.” She maintains a store where she poses as an antiques dealer but, in reality, she works with a fence who takes most of the proceeds from the sale of the goods Nina steals.
The natural trajectory of your life can be utterly disrupted by one unexpected encounter, setting you so wildly off course that you’re not quite sure if you’ll ever find your way back to the path you were on.
Vanessa Liebling comes from West Coast old money. Her father ran the family business — the Liebling Group, a San Francisco real estate investment firm. Her brother, Benny, was the worrisome child. Their father feared that he inherited their mother’s mental illness, a disability that she was never able to manage. They came to the family home, Stonehaven, in Lake Tahoe, a sprawling, medieval-like house filled with antiques and massive portraits of the Liebling ancestors, so that Benny could attend a prep school there after being expelled from a Bay Area school. There, Benny met Nina, who was also enrolled because a teacher recognized her potential and arranged for her to receive financial aid. Her mother secured a job in a casino and put forth the pretense of working a regular, steady job, as Benny and Nina’s relationship blossomed. The school was known for launching its graduates into ivy league colleges and big careers. But for Nina, it was another chapter that ended with heartbreak, disappointment, and graduation with a liberal arts degree from an ordinary college, accompanied by a six-figure student loan balance. Nina has always blamed Benny’s family, especially his father.
It’s twelve years later. Benny’s parents are both dead, Nina hasn’t seen Benny since she and her mother left Lake Tahoe so long ago, and Vanessa has moved back to Stonehaven after being dumped by her fiancee because he feared she would not make the right kind of wife for an up-and-coming politician. Vanessa became an Instagram influencer with half a million followers and a photographer she employed to ensure that her pictures perfectly illustrated her glamorous life. She explains her success: “The ability to convincingly perform authenticity is perhaps the most necessary skillset for my generation. And the image you exude must be compelling. It must be brand-positive, it must be cohesive no matter how fractured your internal dialog might be, because otherwise your fans will sniff you out as a fraud.” Her father did not hold back his disappointment, expressing his opinion that her activities did not constitute a career. But Vanessa knew that, of course. She says she has always known that “I didn’t have something powerful inside me, something compelling me toward greatness. I had only good enough.” But she had the Liebling name. Now Vanessa has very little money left and is transitioning the focus of her Instagram posts to more natural and spiritual pursuits. She has to decide what to do about the estate and all of its contents. In the interim, she decides to rent the caretaker’s cottage to tourists to generate some much-needed income.
Nina has kept track of Vanessa’s social media presence and recalls that her father kept a million dollars in a safe situated within Stonehaven because Benny used to pilfer money from his father’s stash. She also knows that Benny’s birthday was the safe’s combination. If she can gain access to the safe and the cash is still there, she will have enough money to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment, make a fresh start . . . and evade arrest. No matter what, she has to get out of Los Angeles if she wants to remain free. But what is the safe is empty?
Brown relates Nina’s story via a first-person narrative with a voice that is compelling, credible, and infuriating. Because Nina is self-aware. She knows that she has made bad choices and is solely responsible for them, as well as the consequences. Yet she is emotionally stuck because, in her mind, the Lieblings stole her future from her and she has never forgiven them. She wants to finally get revenge. She and her mother were forced to leave town. Their unceremonious exit from Lake Tahoe and her inability to complete high school there signify the beginning of the end of the glorious future her mother envisioned for her. She and her mother returned to Las Vegas and her mother resumed grifting. The time they spent in :ale Tahoe “broke something critical inside me: the ability to believe in my own potential. I knew now what I really was: a nobody, disposable, destined for nothing.” Now that Vanessa is back at Stonehaven and Nina needs money, the time is right. Lachlan signs on and they rent the caretaker’s cottage from Vanessa, adopting fictitious identities and histories in order to befriend Vanessa and, hopefully, find that the Liebling safe still holds enough cash to solve Nina’s problems . . . and make the Lieblings pay for their treatment of her and her mother.
Nina’s narration alternates with Vanessa’s who, like Nina, is self-aware in many respects, but also deeply flawed. Vanessa recognizes that she is capable of leading a life that is far more substantial than posting a series of staged photos on a social media platform, but she is self-absorbed and accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle, and uncertain about how to make her own way in the world now that her parents are gone, her trust fund is nearly depleted, and she is responsible for her brother. She has a love-hate relationship with Stonehaven, and is quite lonely and at loose ends in familiar surroundings under the current circumstances.
Pretty Things is an inventive, creative story about hope, regret, grudges, and stunning betrayals. Brown believes that “characters define story because otherwise you’re just taking characters and shoving them into action.” It shows, because her development of the characters of Nina and Vanessa is mesmerizing, and Brown ramps up the dramatic tension as the two are reunited, gradually revealing what each actually knows about the other. Brown’s telling of her intricately-plotted story is masterful, the subject matter timely and contemporary. She capitalizes on her settings, evocatively establishing her characters’ moods and intentions, and utilizing Stonehaven especially effectively. The estate practically serves as an additional character in the story. Her rich prose grants readers an intimate look into the lives and psyches of Nina and Vanessa, keeping readers on edge as they ponder which they should root for. Or, perhaps, if they should cheer neither one of them on. Because the characters are fully formed and multi-dimensional, neither woman fully good or purely bad, the story resonates emotionally, especially with respect to Benny, the troubled young man that Nina never forget. Brown delivers one unexpected development after another, ramping up the story’s pace until it culminates with a jaw-dropping finale that most readers will never see coming.
Acclaimed author Harlan Coben says that Brown is “your new must-read author” and he’s right. Pretty Things is a smart, entertaining thriller that is thoroughly un-put-down-able.
Excerpt from Pretty Things
1.
The nightclub is a temple, devoted to the sacred worship of indulgence. Inside these walls there is no judgment: You’ll find no populists, no protestors, no spoilsports who might ruin the fun. (The velvet ropes out front stand sentry against all that.) Instead, there are girls in fur and designer silk, swanning and preening like exotic birds, and men with diamonds in their teeth. There are fireworks erupting from bottles of thousand-dollar vodka. There is marble and leather and brass that is polished until it gleams like gold.
The DJ drops a bass beat. The dancers cheer. They lift their phones toward the sky and vamp and click, because if this is a church then social media is their scripture; and that tiny screen is how they deify themselves.
Here they are: the one percent. The young and ultra-rich. Billionaire babies, millionaire millennials, fabu-grammars. “Influencers.” They have it all and they want the whole world to know. Pretty things, so many pretty things in the world; and we get them all, says their every Instagram photo. Covet this life, for it is the best life, and we are #blessed.
Out there, in the middle of it all, is a woman. She’s dancing with abandon in a spot where the light hits her just so and glimmers on her skin. A faint sheen of sweat dampens her face; her glossy dark hair whips around her face as she swivels her body to the grinding beat. The waitresses headed to the bottle-service tables have to maneuver around her, the fizzing sparklers on their trays in danger of setting the woman’s hair alight. Just another L.A. party girl, looking for a good time.
Look close, though, and you can see that her half-closed eyes are sharp and alert, dark with watching. She is watching one person in particular, a man at a table a few feet away.
The man is drunk. He lounges in a booth with a group of male friends—gelled hair, leather jackets, Gucci sunglasses at night; twentysomethings who shout over the music in broken English and baldly leer at the women who careen past. Occasionally, this man will plunge his face to the table to do a line of cocaine, narrowly missing the flotilla of empty glasses that litter its surface. When a Jay-Z song comes on, the man climbs up on the seat of his banquette and shakes up a giant bottle of champagne—a rare large-format bottle of Cristal—and then sprays it over the heads of the crowd. Girls shriek as $50,000 worth of bubbly ruins their dresses and drips to the floor, making them slip in their heels. The man laughs so hard he nearly falls down.
A waitress lugs over a replacement bottle of champagne, and as she sets it on the table the man slips his hand right up under her skirt as if he’s purchased her along with the bottle. The waitress blanches, afraid to push him off lest she lose what promises to be a sizable tip: her rent for the month, at the very least. Her eyes rise helplessly to meet those of the dark-haired woman who is still dancing a few feet away. And this is when the woman makes her move.
She dances toward the man and then—oops!—she trips and falls right into him, dislodging his hand from the waitress’s crotch. The waitress, grateful, flees. The man swears in Russian, until his eyes focus enough to register the windfall that has just landed in his lap. Because the woman is pretty—as all the women here must be in order to get past the bouncers—dark-featured and slight, maybe a hint of Spanish or Latina? Not the sexiest girl in the club, not the most ostentatious, but she’s well dressed, her skirt suggestively short. Most important: She doesn’t blink as the man swiftly shifts his attention to her; doesn’t react at all to the possessive hand on her thigh, the sour breath in her ear.
Instead, she sits with him and his friends, letting him pour her champagne, sipping it slowly even as the man puts back another half-dozen drinks. Women come and go from the table; she stays. Smiling and flirting, waiting for the moment when the men are all distracted by the arrival of a tabloid-friendly basketball star a few tables over; and then she swiftly and silently tips the contents of a clear vial of liquid into the man’s drink.
A few minutes pass as he finishes his drink. He pushes back from the table, working to upright himself. This is when she leans in and kisses him, closing her eyes to push away her revulsion as his tongue—a thick, chalky slug—robes hers. His friends goggle and jeer obscenities in Russian. When she can’t take it anymore, she pulls back and whispers something in his ear, then stands, tugging at his hand. Within a few minutes they are on their way out of the club, where a valet jumps to attention and conjures up a banana-yellow Bugatti.
But the man is feeling odd now, on the verge of collapse; it’s the champagne or the cocaine, he’s not sure which, but he finds he can’t object when the woman tugs the keys from his hand and slips behind the wheel herself. Before he passes out in the passenger seat, he manages to give her an address in the Hollywood Hills.
The woman carefully maneuvers the Bugatti up through the streets of West Hollywood, past the illuminated billboards selling sunglasses and calfskin purses, the buildings with fifty-foot-tall ads hawking Emmy-nominated TV series. She turns up the quieter winding roads that lead to Mulholland, white-knuckling it the whole time. The man snores beside her and rubs irritably at his crotch. When they finally get to the gate of his house, she reaches over and gives his cheek a hard pinch, startling him awake so that he can give her the code for entry.
The gate draws back to reveal a modernist behemoth, with walls entirely of glass, an enormous translucent birdcage hovering over the city.
It takes some effort to coax the man out of the passenger seat, and the woman has to prop him upright as they walk to the door. She notes the security camera and steps out of its range, then notes the numbers that the man punches into the door’s keyless entry. When it opens, the pair is greeted by the shrieking of a burglar alarm. The man fumbles with the alarm keypad and the woman studies this, too.
Inside, the house is cold as a museum, and just as inviting. The man’s interior decorator has clearly been given the mandate of “more is more” and emptied the contents of a Sotheby’s catalog into these rooms. Everything is rendered in leather and gold and glass, with furniture the size of small cars positioned under crystal chandeliers and art clogging every wall. The woman’s heels clack on marble floors polished to a mirror gleam. Through the windows, the lights of Los Angeles shimmer and pulse: the lives of the common people below on display as this man floats here in the sky, safely above it all.
The man is slipping back into oblivion as the woman half drags him through the cavernous home in search of his bedroom. She finds it up a set of stairs, a frigid white mausoleum with zebra skin on the floors and chinchilla on the pillows, overlooking an illuminated pool that glows like an alien beacon in the night. She maneuvers him to the bed, dropping him onto its rumpled sheets just moments before he rolls over and vomits. She leaps back so that the mess doesn’t splash her sandals, and regards the man coolly.
Once he’s passed out again, she slips into the bathroom and frantically scrubs her tongue with toothpaste. She can’t get his taste out of her mouth. She shudders, studies herself in the mirror, breathes deeply.
Back in the bedroom, she tiptoes around the vomit puddle on the floor, pokes the man with a tentative finger. He doesn’t respond. He’s pissed the bed.
That’s when her real work begins. First, to the man’s walk-in closet, with its floor-to-ceiling displays of Japanese jeans and limited-edition sneakers; a rainbow of silk button-downs in ice cream colors; fine-weave suits still in their garment bags. The woman zeroes in on a glass-topped display table in the center of the room, under which an array of diamond-encrusted watches gleam. She pulls a phone out of her purse and snaps a photo.
Excerpted from Pretty Things by Janelle Brown. Copyright © 2020 by Janelle Brown. Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group – Random House. All rights reserved.
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