Hoping for a big payday, the disgruntled personal assistant to a powerful hedge fund CEO organizes an ersatz kidnapping of an employee who doesn’t exist in Peters’ thriller.

Ronnie Hewitt has plenty of reasons for her angry grudge against capitalism: Her father, Robert, lost his job and pension during the tumultuous downturn of the 1990s and sunk into a depressive abyss. He died of heart failure when Ronnie was 15, and the insurance company denied her mother, Carlotta, the payout she deserved, claiming Robert had killed himself. Now, Carlotta languishes in a second-rate home for the elderly because Ronnie can’t afford a better one. She expresses her angry contempt for the system she despises, delicately but powerfully captured by the author, through art; she writes for an improvisational theater, Jubilee, that revels in the comic lampooning of the delusional grandeur of the privileged. Paradoxically, she also works in the beating heart of the very economy she loathes—Ronnie is the personal assistant to Barry Kestrel, the CEO of Boundary, a major hedge fund in New York City he founded 27 years ago. Ronnie has a plan to secure a financial windfall and take revenge on the robber barons of the world. She will stage a fake kidnapping of a Boundary employee, Martin Newman, who doesn’t even exist: She concocted him out of thin air and, with the help of her tech-savvy boyfriend, Alex, inserted his employee file into the company’s records. But even the most ingenious plan cannot account for every eventuality, and the conspiratorial couple begin to encounter a slew of unanticipated problems—not the least of which is that someone finds out about their grift, artfully assumes the identity of the nonexistent Martin Newman, and shows up looking for his cut.

The plot is uncommonly complicated, but it is a testament to the strength and clarity of Peters’ writing that the reader is never lost—this is a deeply tangled but not gratuitously convoluted tale. And it is strangely, even astonishingly, plausible, or least rendered so in the able hands of the author. Every character is so realistically drawn, so full of nuanced life, that the unpredictable swerves that occur later in the novel (some of which could even be seen as fantastical) read as entirely sound. At the heart of the book is Ronnie, a fascinatingly complex woman who despises the financial predators who feasted upon her family’s travails. In response to the charge from “Martin Newman” that she hates her own country, she responds: “We don’t hate this country… It’s scumbags like Kestrel we hate. In the crash when his company bottomed out, everybody lost. Except him of course. People like him are too big to fail. Now he’s gonna make a fortune selling his company while most people are out there still scraping by. We don’t hate America. We’re saving it.” This is a bewitching novel, bursting with insight, depth, and astonishing unpredictability.

A rare treat—deeply thoughtful, strikingly original, and powerfully dramatic.