A seat on the executive board should be a professional peak for a corporate lawyer. Instead, it's a life-threatening trap. Success hasn't been easy for Ellice Littlejohn. As a Black woman, she's dealt with barriers other lawyers haven't, especially in Atlanta, a city that, despite its vibrant and diverse present, hasn't shed its racist history. To rise, Ellice has carefully shaped her image-and left out certain pieces of her past, like her childhood in a small, grindingly poor Georgia town where some very bad things happened before she escaped via a scholarship to an elite boarding school. She has secrets in the present, too, notably her long-term affair with Michael Sayles, who is married, White, and her boss in Houghton Transportation's legal department. When he summons her for an early-morning meeting and she arrives at his office to find him dead, an apparent suicide, she keeps that a secret, too, leaving his body to be discovered by someone else. Ellice had no delusions about being in love with Michael-it was a colleagues-with-benefits situation for a woman focused more on her career than her personal life-but his death blows up her entire life. Among its least expected effects: She's promoted to his job as head of legal, which puts her on the board of a family-owned, almost entirely White corporation. Houghton has been under pressure about its lack of employee diversity, and her hiring should improve their optics. But she feels distinctly unwelcome on the board despite the support of company CEO Nate Ashe, a somewhat dotty Southern gentleman. The harder she looks into what really happened to Michael, the more she uncovers in the company that alarms her. At the same time, her own secrets are being revealed. Morris builds an escalating thriller plot packed with convincing details about corporate politics and skulduggery. She also provides a knowledgeable portrait of Atlanta's complex social structure. One of Ellice's secrets is Vera Henderson, the woman who raised her and her brother, Sam. Vera, once a fierce defender of children and women, is now a dementia patient in a nursing home, and Morris skillfully paints the loving, painful relationship between her and Ellice. Corporate competition is not only racist and sexist, but deadly in this confident debut thriller. Copyright Kirkus 2021 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
|