My Review with Spoilers for Trust Issues discusses this book that is a fun combination of a rich family thriller with a con artist story. Is Trust Issues for you? Trust me to give you the scoop and help you decide!
Jen’s Quick Take on Trust Issues by Elizabeth McCullough Keenan and Greg Wands
- Trust Issues has the quirky characters and NYC setting of Only Murders in the Building. It has a twisty plot, with a cat and mouse feel and a con artist face-off
- It’s a story with flawed but likable characters
- In nutshell, two spoiled and dysfunctional siblings have to pull themselves together when the begin to suspect that their wealthy mother was killed by her new husband.
- Publication date: January 28, 2025 by Dutton. 336 pages. Thanks so much to Dutton books for the advance review copy.
- Author team Elizabeth McCullough Keenan and Greg Wands are also known as E.G. Scott, who has written The Woman Inside (2019), In Case of Emergency (2020), and The Rule of Three (2023)
Review With Spoilers for Trust Issues
Rich yet dysfunctional, Hazel and Kagan have run through much of their wealthy mother Janice’s money on failed marriages, bad business ventures, and luxury living.
When Janice ends up dead under mysterious circumstances and her charming new husband Perry tells them their mother disinherited them, Hazel and Kagan become convinced that Perry must have been involved in Janice’s death.
With the help of Perry’s enigmatic daughter, they figure out a plan to con a con man.
This story gave me such strong Only Murders in the Building vibes. The story begins in New York City, plus Hazel and Kagen are a quirky, wacky pair who are brushed aside by the police.
When Hazel and Kagan track down Ava, Perry’s daughter, things get even more interesting. Ava has her own reasons to want revenge on Perry.
What results is a twisty game of cat and mouse in which the tables turn and then turn again. Who will come out on top of this?
Trust Issues also had interesting things to say about trust and deception in the twenty-first century, and how our digital world has made us more and less trusting, and perhaps easier to con.
Spoilers for Trust Issues
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- Ava, a hacker who served time in prison for wire fraud, was working for Homeland Security.
- Either that or her prison time gave Ava the ability to get fake IDs
- Both Hazel and Kagan are attracted to Ava, who seems to shift between the two of them
- Ava, Kagan, and Hazel track Perry (now going by Walt) to Boca Raton, where he is about to marry a woman named Iris
- Kagan and Hazel befriend Iris and get invited to dinner with her and “Walt”
- Walt is furious when the siblings try to blackmail him
- Ava, who is spying on Walt, learns that he plans to kill the siblings and Iris
- At the wedding, Hazel is shocked when “Adam” her missing ex-boyfriend, shows up. She thinks Adam is working with Walt and the one who killed Janice
- After the wedding, Walt takes Iris, Kagan, and Adam on a boat, which is sabotaged
- The boat begins to sink
- Walt flees to Boca Raton, where he reads a news story that he, Walt Pierson, died in a boating accident
- Ava has managed to save Kagan, Hazel, and a furious Iris
- Besides that, Ava raided Walt’s storage bin, collecting evidence against him
- Ava then steals all Walt’s stolen funds and vanishes
- But Ava realizes that both Hazel and Kagan are spoiled and selfish kids who treated their mother badly. She returns Iris’s money, then leaves the siblings a free trip to rehab (Kagan for drugs, Hazel for internet addiction)
Are you interested in this one? If you enjoyed First Lie Wins or the other books on my list of Thrillers with Con Artists and Grifters, check it out!
Not my favored genre but this sounds fun. I think I’ll check it out.
It was fun if you like a grifter book and sibling banter. I gave it to my husband to try and he’s enjoying it!