5 Revenge and Eat-the-Rich Thrillers About the 1 Percent

You’ll often find me in my pajamas, a mug of lukewarm coffee in one hand and a book about Dom Perignon and Dior in the other. But the reason I’m speeding through the pages is because I know that before the book is over, someone on that superyacht is going to end up dead.

Thrillers about the super-rich meeting sticky ends are having a moment. I think it’s because we almost never see what really goes on behind the gated communities and NDAs, but for a few hundred pages, we get a sneak peek over the hedges into a world of private jets and designer clothes. Then we get to watch it all go up in flames. It’s the same (not-so) guilty pleasure as watching a Lamborghini get stuck behind a slow-moving tractor.

Because behind every great fortune, the saying goes, there’s a crime. Nobody gets a private island by playing nice and the best of these books fling open the wardrobes of the rich and find the skeletons hanging among the Gucci. It feels especially satisfying right now, when billionaires and CEOs can sway everything from elections to who we see in concert stadiums. In fiction, at least, it’s fun to see them brought down to size.

When I was writing I Think We Should Kill Other People, I’d been bingeing Succession and The White Lotus, and I kept coming back to one question: how did these people actually get to the top? More often than not, the answer isn’t talent or hard work, it’s exploiting other people’s hard work and talent.

So I dropped an ordinary, working-class cocktail waitress into that world and let her find out the real cost of exposing them. Hazel ends up on a Bachelor-style dating show, engaged to energy-drink heir Marc Van Batten. But when she leaves him at the altar on the day of their wedding, in front of the cameras and his affluent in-laws, she finds out it’s not so easy to escape the luxury trappings of the billionaire lifestyle. A killer wants the whole Van Batten family dead, and that includes Hazel, ring on her finger or not.

Pour yourself a glass of supermarket prosecco and settle in for five more ‘eat the rich’ thrillers….

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Jeneva Rose, One of Us Is Dead

Some fortunes are built on who you know and where you’re seen. In Buckhead, Atlanta’s wealthiest enclave, status is everything and everyone is a rival. The novel opens with a detective questioning one woman about a murder, then flashes back through the social warfare that led to it.

I really enjoyed this mash-up of Desperate Housewives and Big Little Lies. It’s glossy, bitchy and addictive, and it will make you very glad your own social life is significantly more boring.

Trisha Sakhlecha, The Inheritance

Other fortunes are simply handed down, if you can survive long enough. The Agarwals gather on a private island off the west coast of Scotland, where patriarch Raj has six weeks to decide how to divide his petrochemicals empire between his three children. From the outside they look like the perfect family, but the reunion quickly dissolves into resentment and backstabbing.

This slow-burn is full of complicated relationships and juicy family drama. Imagine Agatha Christie’s Crooked House crossed with Succession.

Bella Mackie, How to Kill Your Family

There’s more than one way to claim your inheritance. When Grace’s billionaire biological father turns down her dying mother’s request for help, she decides to kill his entire side of the family. Grace recounts this tale of rags-kills-riches from jail, so we know from the beginning it didn’t all go according to plan, but the final chapter proves that even when it comes to murder, the rich have a monopoly.

Liv Constantine, The Last Mrs. Parrish

Marrying rich seems like a fast track to wealth, but what if the guy you have your eye on is already taken?

In this fast-paced beach-read, Amber Patterson is tired of being poor. She wants everything Daphne Parrish has, the money, the handsome property-mogul husband and the golden-couple status in exclusive Bishops Harbor, Connecticut. After worming her way into Daphne’s life, she becomes her BFF, and gets closer and closer to her man. But Amber is hiding secrets of her own, and nothing in Daphne’s marriage is quite what it seems.

This one is twisty, wicked and very hard to put down.

Ellery Lloyd, The Club

For the truly rich, money buys the most valuable thing of all: somewhere the rest of us can’t get in. Ellery Lloyd’s pacy, sun-soaked thriller is set in the most exclusive members’ club in the world, housed on a private island where celebrities can party away from the likes of us. But behind the velvet rope, the VIP guests are not quite as protected as they think. By the end of the opening weekend, plenty of them will wish they’d never made the list.

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