Scrap

Summary

A TRUE-CRIME-OBSESSED YOUNG ARTIST IS DRAWN INTO THE LIVES OF A DELIRIOUSLY WEALTHY FAMILY IN THIS FANTASTICALLY ENTERTAINING THRILLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF OTHER PEOPLE’S CLOTHES.

Recently dumped and stuck with the mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn down the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. The scrapbooks, a secret birthday gift for Naomi’s husband, Bryce, trace the Duncans’ twenty-five-year marriage. The conditions: Esther must include every piece of paper she’s been sent, must sign an NDA, and must only contact Naomi using the burner phone provided. Otherwise, she’ll spoil the surprise.

As Esther binges true-crime podcasts and works through the nearly two hundred boxes of Duncan detritus, she finds herself infatuated with the gilded family—until, midproject, Naomi dies suspiciously. When Esther becomes convinced the husband killed her, she uses the scrapbooks’ trove of information to insert herself into the Duncans’ lives to prove it. But the more Esther investigates, the further she is dragged back to the scorched earth of her own past in the art world.

Laced with pitch-black humor and conspiratorial unease, Scrap is a razor-sharp examination of wealth and power, art and truth, of the line between justice and revenge—and who gets to cross it.

“[A] black comedy that revels in the fabulously entertaining dysfunction at the heart of the world’s disgustingly wealthy … Henkel’s lacerating eye for the morally ambiguous keeps you hooked."—Daily Mail