In These Thrillers, the Real Estate Market Is the Monster
As high rates and tight supply warp the housing market, bidding wars and desperate schemes are spilling into fiction.
Illustration: Miroslav Weissmuller for Bloomberg
Marisa Kashino has spent the past few months listening to confessions. Her debut novel, Best Offer Wins (Celadon Books), follows Margo Miyake, a DC-based publicist who goes to outlandish lengths to secure the family home of her dreams. Since Kashino began promoting it at book clubs, readers have shared dozens of devious house-buying maneuvers of their own.
At one Zoom book club, a woman told Kashino she’d long coveted a particular home near her own. One day she struck up a conversation with the renters. The owner was sick, they told her, clearly fretting about their own tenure in the house should she die, which seemed increasingly likely. It drove the woman to a devious workaround: She tracked down the owner’s offspring online and reached out to them directly. “She made the children a sort of preemptive offer for when the time came,” Kashino says. “She really tried to get in ahead of the house even being vacated.”