Best Offer Wins: A Novel

Best Offer Wins: A Novel by Marisa Kashino

A couple in DC is trying to buy a house. Alas, they get outbid in all their offers. They want to have a family, but getting the house first is a priority. The book is told primarily from the perspective of the Asian wife. Then they hear from a friend that a house in Maryland is coming on the market. The woman decides to scope it out. She absolutely loves it. She even decides to sneak in the back yard for a look. She stays too long and almost gets caught by the owner. However, she manages to get out just in time, but does run into him. She decides she will try to get the house as a "pre-listing" transaction. She stalks the owners and discovers that they are a gay couple with an adopted Asian daughter. She  tries a yoga class that one attends.  They actually hit it off and end up getting invited to dinner. At dinner she pushes things too far about an offer and end up getting discovered and kicked out. That is still not enough. She hunts for dirt on the couple. She discovers that somebody had bad things to say about one of the men (a university professor who published a book.) She traced all the students in his program at the time to see if she could find who it was. (She had previously been a journalist, so had connections as well as desire to do it.) She travelled distances to find dirt to potentially use it against them. She found he plagiarized a student. However, the student realized that she was a fraud and didn't give her the evidence. She tried to use this against the men. However, they eventually called her bluff.

Then the novel takes a very macabre turn. She realizes that her husband had been having an affair. She kills the woman involved and takes her body to the basement of the house. She framed it as having been done by a friend of hers. (She had the friend tour the house and used the friend's car and dressed like the friend when committing the crime.) Then, right before the police were ready to catch the friend, she gave her various drugs to make it look like she committed suicide. It helped wrap everything up. It also left the house available to them as the only people willing to put in an offer. The book ends with the woman discovering another affair from her husband and makes us wonder what she will be doing.

The book is a fast moving case of desperation in a crazy housing market.