Tripping Arcadia

January 3, 2022
When Boston med school dropout Lena Gereghty, the narrator of Mayquist’s seductive if flawed fever dream of a debut, arrives at the Verdeau family’s imposing Back Bay mansion to start her badly needed new job, she has no inkling of the depravity and danger that await her. Hired to assist the family’s full-time physician, Lena expects to focus on Byronically handsome Jonathan Verdeau, the favorite of his billionaire father, Martin, and reluctant heir apparent to the clan’s corporate empire. Jonathan’s issues beyond excessive drinking remain mysterious. Meanwhile, Lena would prefer to spend time with Jonathan’s coolly glamorous sister, Audrey, who makes her own pulse quicken. Lena begins to grasp what a Faustian bargain she’s struck after working her first bacchanal at the family’s secluded country estate in the Berkshires, where she winds up treating myriad roofied revelers who have unwittingly OD’d. When she learns that Martin’s takeover of her father’s employer precipitated his firing, she begins plotting revenge. Ingenious plot twists abound, though Mayquist struggles to tie up everything convincingly. The louche flair the author displays, however, suggests he’s capable of an even more satisfying second act. Agent: Emmy Nordstrom Higdon, Westwood Creative Artists.

January 1, 2022
A young woman takes a job working for a wealthy family with a deadly secret in Mayquist's debut. Lena is a medical school dropout who recently came home to Boston after having spent two years in Italy working with her Aunt Clare, an expert in plants and herbal medicine. Lena's family is down on their luck after her father lost his job, so when she's called to a lavish brownstone in Back Bay for an interview to work as an assistant to the wealthy Verdeau family's personal physician, Dr. Prosenko, she's desperate to get the job despite the family's oddities. Martin, the patriarch, runs the immense family company, while beautiful daughter Audrey flits in to set Lena's heart racing, and sickly son Jonathan leans into a drinking habit despite his mysterious and debilitating illness. Horrified by Jonathan's disregard for his own health and disgusted by the excesses of Martin's wealth, Lena finds herself pushed over the edge by a lavish party at the family's Berkshires estate where she witnesses the way Martin and his rich friends torment and toy with ordinary people. She decides that enough is enough. Using the knowledge of herbal medicines and poisons she learned from her aunt, Lena concocts a plan to teach Martin a lesson he won't soon forget. It takes a few chapters for Mayquist to get the tone right, with much of Lena's gothic-tinged narration feeling out of place in the modern setting. But once Lena's plan starts taking shape, the plot accelerates along with it as well-deployed twists keep both Lena and the reader on their toes. A shaky start but a propulsive plot.

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January 1, 2022
Returning from Italy, medical-school dropout Lena arrives in Boston to find her family in financial crisis. Desperate to help, she takes a job as an assistant to Dr. Prosenko, private physician to the headline-grabbing Verdeau family. Warning signs appear quickly, beginning with Prosenko's peculiar secrecy about just what's wrong with their patient, Jonathan Verdeau, heir to the family fortune, and extending to why Lena has been told to attend various family functions. Those events, it turns out, are bacchanalian orgies designed to feed patriarch Martin Verdeau's ego. Lena and Prosenko's role is to revive waves of overdosed partygoers. Enraged at being co-opted to assist in Verdeau's abuses, Lena vows to punish him. When her plan goes awry, however, she becomes involved in a plot far more twisted than her own. In this evocative depiction of a dangerously seductive world, awash in gothic overtones, Mayquist tweaks class tensions as he portrays Lena's growing desperation for control. Will she be the Verdeau heir's long-awaited rescuer or an unwitting participant in further degradation?

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2022

After her father is injured and then fired, Lena helps support her parents by grabbing an ambiguous-sounding job with the louche, wealthy, Boston-based Verdeaus; she helps the family doctor tend to Jonathan, the family's sickly, alcohol-unsteady heir. As she works the family's over-the-top parties (struggling to resist Jonathan's gorgeous sister, Audrey), she learns a shocking truth: the Verdeaus are responsible for her father's misfortune. And she vows revenge. From bisexual, trans masculine writer Mayquist.

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