El Dorado Drive - Hardcover

Abbott, Megan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593084969 ISBN 13: 9780593084960

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Named a Best Book of Summer by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, CrimeReads, and more!

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout comes a simmering, atmospheric novel of friendship and betrayal, following a women-led pyramid scheme in suburban Detroit.

"Abbott is a superstar of the suspense genre." —NPR

All I want is to be innocent again. But that's not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel.

The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister Pam—currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband—and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club.

The Wheel offers women like themselves—middle-aged and of declining means—a way to make their own money, independent of husbands or families. Quickly, however, the Wheel’s success, and their own addiction to it, leads to greater and greater risks—and a crime so shocking it threatens to bring everything down with it.

Megan Abbott turns her keen eye toward women and money in El Dorado Drive, a riveting story about power, vulnerability, and how desperation draws out our most destructive impulses.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Megan Abbott is the Edgar award-winning author of eleven crime novels, including You Will Know Me, Give Me Your Hand and the New York Times bestseller The Turnout, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review and the Wall Street Journal. Dare Me, the series she adapted from her own novel, now streaming on Netflix. Her latest novel, Beware the Woman, is now in paperback.

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1

Nine months ago

Everything's changing," Pam said softly.

"It always is," Harper said, squeezing her sister's hand as they sat, uncomfortably, on folding chairs sinking heavily into the football field lawn.

Onstage, Pam's son, Patrick, gauntly handsome in his goblin-green Norseman robe, rose from the folding chair to accept his high school diploma.

Harper felt her eyes fill. How was he still not age six, elbows on the table, meticulously removing the plastic and eating two rolls of powdered mini-donuts in one sitting, his fingers, his face, even his long eyelashes, dusted white?

An average student, Patrick had devoted most of his energies to running track, to all his jobs-painting fences and mowing lawns until he was burnished brown, his arms like carved banisters. And, most of all, to the care and maintenance of his little sister, Vivian, who sat beside Harper now, chin trembling, shaking off mascara tears.

But if you looked at Patrick on that stage-so solemn, his polyester robe glinting like spun satin-you might think he was valedictorian, class president, most likely to succeed. It was the way he carried himself, so regal, very grand, and Harper wanted to cry, too, Pam sobbing beside her now.

"I'm just so proud," Pam kept saying, but Harper wondered if there was some strange kind of relief too. Relief that he'd made it, he'd graduated, and, thanks to a modest track scholarship, he was going to some college in Chicago-away, further away than any of them ever had.

When he turned to wave to them from the dais, the look on Patrick's face reminded Harper of a skittish colt, eyes darting. He'd made it through a calamitous childhood, scissored in two by his parents' ugly and endless divorce. He had gotten out. Somehow, Pam had gotten him out. Or he had gotten himself out.

So Harper decided not to see it as an omen when his diploma slipped carelessly from his long fingers as he glided across the stage, the kid behind him accidentally stepping on it, flattening it under his penny loafer.


It was only when the caps flew in the air that Harper realized her niece, Vivian, had abandoned them, a flash of chlorine-blue hair slinking behind the football stands with another girl. The two of them nearly disappearing inside their spray-painted hoodies, their bare legs poking through.

"This is going to be hard for her," Harper said.

Pam nodded gravely.

No one knew what they'd do about Vivian, once a sweet, earnest little girl who followed her big brother everywhere and loved nothing more than riding. Harper herself had put her on her first, an old gray quarter pony named Lumpy, at age five.

Now a surly sixteen with a midnight-black manicure and pierced tongue, Vivian spent most of her time riding around in strangers' cars, a vodka bottle necked between her knees, pouring for a parade of sweet-faced girls, many of whom would kick off their sparkly sneakers in Vivian's bedroom and slide under her satin comforter, licking Vivian's laughing face, insisting, if Harper opened the door, It's a slumber party, we swear.

Pam didn't seem to register any of it, but Harper marveled over their ease and comfort, Vivian and her girlfriends. Times were so different now, she wanted to say.

How do you keep track? Harper would tease her niece.

And Vivian would remind Harper in that scratchy voice of hers, thick with tar, I'm young.

But that was before her mother laid down the law on New Year's Eve-Vivian cuffed inside a patrol car, kicked out of some warehouse party in Corktown, jaw clenched and hands purple, something about a potato chip bag full of MDMA. That was before her father threatened to send her to boarding school-and not the kind you'd like, he warned in the all-caps text Vivian promptly showed Harper.

But Patrick had stepped up, taking Vivian everywhere he went, to the mall movie theater with the sticky carpeting and the neon arcade games, to National Coney Island for chili dogs or to Sanders Chocolate Shoppe for hot fudge ice cream puffs at the counter, like the hundred times Pam had taken them as little kids, as their mother had taken them.

Every day after school, Vivian sat high in the stands, watching her brother run track, pretending to do her homework while carving graffiti on a bleacher bench, but-at least-behaving, staying still, keeping, as Pam would say with a sigh, her panties on.

But now Patrick was leaving.

It'll be just me and Vivian, Pam had said that very morning, her brow damp from making a hundred mortarboard candy pops for the graduation party. Adding with a laugh, One of us is coming out in a body bag.


It wasn’t until after the ceremony that their big sister, Debra, finally appeared, her husband, Perry, trailing behind in the same linen Hickey Freeman sports jacket all the fathers in Grosse Pointe wore, trying to catch his breath.

"We weren't late," Debra insisted. "Perry couldn't make it up the stands. I can only guess you forgot to reserve us seats on the lawn. . . ."

"It doesn't matter," Pam said, winking at Harper, who tried not to laugh. That morning, they'd made a twenty-dollar bet on how quickly Debra would complain about the seating.

"Well, it matters to me," Debra started to say, then stopped herself, kissing Pam on both cheeks.

"Hell, Pammy, you did it," Perry said, squeezing Pam's arm. "By hook or by crook, you got your boy through."

"Hook and crook," Pam laughed. "And a lot of sweaty glad-handing at the PTA."

"The question is," Debra asked, looking around, fanning herself with her program, "where's the proud papa?"


It had been the big unknown, whether Patrick’s father, Doug, would show, maybe in a puff of sulfur, Pam had joked, knowing her ex-husband all too well.

"It's okay, Mom," Patrick said after the ceremony, slipping one arm around her and his other around Vivian. "He's been working a lot. I figured he might not make it."

"He could still come to the party," Vivian said softly, her eyes raccooned from crying all day, a bandage hanging loose, her brother's name newly tattooed on her calf.

"I'm sure he'll try," Harper said, curling her arm around her niece.

But you never could be sure with Doug, and part of her was relieved he hadn't yet appeared. All day she kept thinking she saw him from the corner of her eye-a flash of madras, the smell of his clove-thick aftershave. It made her nervous. It had been so long.


The sky heavy with looming rain, there was an anarchic, spooky feeling in the air as the parking lot filled with crushed graduation caps and trampled robes, with sweat-slicked parents trying to corral their whooping seniors, some of them jumping on random car hoods, a champagne bottle crashing, spattering green glass, foam.

Zigzagging through the crowd, Harper ran into her nephew Stevie, Debra's sweet burnout of a son.

"Where'd everybody go?" he asked, scratching his head.

It turned out his parents had left without him, forgotten him, as Stevie put it, laughing in his slouchy jeans, his eyes red and sad. Stevie, who had no driver's license after last year's second DUI.

Harper offered him a ride in her beat-up minivan, a cast-off of Pam's, twelve years old and two hundred thousand miles.

Nudging their way to the school exit, Harper and Stevie witnessed two separate fender benders and a dad-on-dad shoving match, a bristle of panic rolling through the lot.

"I can't believe it," Stevie said, punching the cigarette lighter. "Patrick's doing it. He's really doing it."

"Going to college?" Harper said, pulling at last onto Vernier Road.

"Getting out," Stevie said, his sunglasses falling over his nose as Harper hit the gas. "The great escape . . ."

Harper guessed the unremarkable school Patrick had...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593084969
• ISBN 13: 9780593084960
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 354
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland