When the reader meets Lyla, the character who narrates the first portion of GOOD RICH PEOPLE, she comes off as cold, almost emotionless, both utterly bored with her life and yet seemingly in fear of losing her lifestyle. She is married to Graham, a fabulously handsome man whose looks are dwarfed only by his riches. And, as Lyla informs the reader, Graham’s mother Margo’s wealth dwarfs Graham’s: “His mother has money that makes our money look poor.”

"[A]lthough many of its most significant twists will not come as a huge surprise to astute readers, almost everyone will be taken aback at some point during this propulsive, deeply chilling novel."

Lyla spends her days making herself beautiful, having superficial conversations with the vacuous, image-obsessed wives of Graham’s friends and colleagues, and --- as the novel opens --- figuring out how best to play her part in the game that Graham and Margo have been playing. At first, the game’s rules are inscrutable. All the reader knows is that it has something to do with the guesthouse that is situated underneath the glass and chrome splendor of Graham and Lyla’s terraced house in the Los Angeles hills. It’s clear that the game’s intentions are to ruin the lives of the guesthouse’s tenants, all for Graham and Margo’s amusement. But something went wrong the last time they played the game --- and now, in part to punish Lyla for her role in that failure, they’re making her take the lead.

The tenant Margo has chosen is a woman named Demi, a self-made tech entrepreneur with questionable taste in home furnishings. Lyla isn’t quite sure how she’s meant to ruin Demi’s life; all she knows is that she needs to figure it out quickly or risk boring Graham --- and consequently losing him.

This setup continues until Lyla finally meets Demi and starts putting the game in motion, at which point the narrative switches to Demi’s point of view --- and readers start to realize that Demi is not the only one being played. As the novel progresses, the narrative switches back and forth between Lyla’s and Demi’s points of view, with their varying perspectives shedding new and often surprising light on overlapping events.

GOOD RICH PEOPLE is structured as a mystery, and although many of its most significant twists will not come as a huge surprise to astute readers, almost everyone will be taken aback at some point during this propulsive, deeply chilling novel. Along the way, even as the situations grow more and more extreme, even preposterous (Margo has a garden fashioned on Dante’s circles of hell, and the book’s climax takes place during a truly debauched birthday party), Lyla and Demi’s story offers oblique commentary on the extremes of societal inequities and the corrupting potential of extreme wealth.