EVERY LAST SECRET

The blow-by-blow battle between two Silicon Valley wives over one of their husbands and a whole lot more.

In this corner is Catherine Winthorpe, effortlessly beautiful wife to sexy, rugged, demanding, fabulously wealthy William Winthorpe, who treats the high-salaried employees he’s pushing to perfect and market a breakthrough new medical device like serfs and his wife like a queen. In this corner is Neena Ryder, Winthorpe Technologies’ new director of motivation, who loses no opportunity to correct everyone who calls her Mrs. Ryder that it’s Dr. Ryder. Though her own amiable mate, demolition contractor Matthew Ryder, loves her to pieces and makes just enough to have bought the place next door to the Winthorpe’s baronial estate in untouchable Atherton, Neena’s determined to seduce William because she wants to trade up on husbands or, failing that, get a seven-figure payoff to go away—and because she’s taken a particular dislike to Cat, who represents all the women Neena’s fought over the years and who’s begging to be taken down a peg or 10. The rules of engagement are flexible—open flirting, barefaced lying, charity committee blackballing, and criminal conspiracy are all perfectly acceptable—but a prologue makes it clear that the rivalry will eventually end up under the purview of the Atherton Police Department. Torre raises the heat on the plotting and counterplotting with such delicate mastery that even readers who can see perfectly well where this is all going will race to watch it get there.

Deliciously, sublimely nasty: Mean Girls for grown-ups.