Soft Money: A Novel

A wine label. A members' lounge. A dead man in their Fairmont suite.At three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, Marie Calloway and her three best friends turn down a private banker's too-good investment in Suite 1804 of the Fairmont. By six he is dead on the carpet. A bottle of their own wine is on its side beside him, Marie's lipstick is on the glass, and there is a note in her handwriting that she never wrote.By midnight, a Treasury agent who has been watching her for ten months has walked her out of her own gala. Four million dollars has left the company account with her forged signature on it. Two men in a car with Sacramento plates are parked outside her mama's house in the Bayview. And a text arrives in her grandmother's words, from a number nobody knows. Her grandmother has been dead for ten years.Marie, Angel, Imani and Ebony have been sisters since they were girls, with not one drop of blood between them. They built Soft Money Cellars out of a stock account, a kitchen island and a promise to each other. Now someone who knows them better than they know themselves is taking it apart, one piece of paper at a time.To find out who, Marie has to go back to a bench outside a liquor store on Innes Avenue, the summer she was fourteen. And she has to find a woman in a prison in Chowchilla who has been waiting five years for somebody to ask her the right question.Book One of the Glow Girls.