Megan Abbott and I grew up in Michigan, in the “Pleasant Valley Sunday” world Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote about for the Monkees. In the spectral hush of this now-faded suburbia, Megan has carved out a singular domain: the dark undercurrent of women’s lives. Her noir is not the domain of trench coats and alleyways, but of ponytail holders, Pilates studios, and the simmering silence of family dinners.
I’ve been a fan since Bury Me Deep. Her prose and plotting are so practically perfect as to alternately inspire and depress my own irregular attempts at fiction. She is the real deal.
In El Dorado Drive, Megan returns to the terrain that has become her calling card, places where social rituals are precise, femininity is choreographed, and beneath the polish lies a festering urgency.
The novel is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, once a monument to Detroit’s industrial might, now a community with a chipped veneer, clinging to rituals of affluence long after the revenue streams have dried up. Into this terrain come the Bishop sisters, Pam, Debra, and Harper, middle-aged women navigating the disorienting slide from comfort to quiet panic. Divorce, illness, debt: the markers of American predictability stack like kindling around their modest lives, ready for a spark.
That ignition arrives in the form of The Wheel, a women-only financial circle cloaked in the vocabulary of empowerment. A participant gifts a sum to a stranger, who in turn ascends a ladder of monetary rebirth, ostensibly supported by the community of women who follow. But this ritual is no sacred circle, it is a pyramid scheme with lip gloss. The old model of masculine fraud, the con artist with a gold watch, has been replaced here by scented candles and affirmations, by a “safe space” where denial is a group project.
Megan is especially attuned to the linguistic seductions of the con. The language of The Wheel is antiseptic, evasive. No one “invests”, they “gift.” There are no profits, only “blessings.” It is the vocabulary of magical thinking, designed not just to obscure the truth from others, but to keep it from oneself. Here, delusion becomes a communal effort, passed between women like hand-me-downs. The effect is both absurd and terrifying.
What gives the story its ballast is the dynamic among the Bishop sisters, who are less characters than a living braid of memory, resentment, and unmet longing. Their interactions shimmer with the kind of tension that accumulates only over decades, where every eye-roll or sigh carries the weight of shared bedrooms, family secrets, and love that often feels like obligation. The scheme’s pull is not just financial; it promises a recalibration of status, a chance to return to the image they once had of themselves.
Megan handles this slow implosion with the precision of a forensic investigator. As with her other books, she is less interested in the crime itself than in the cultural sediment that allows it to flourish. Her parties, where The Wheel spins and the envelopes are exchanged, are rituals of ecstatic denial. The bills are fanned like tarot cards, the scent of new wealth mingling with stale coffee and perfume. There is a religious fervor to these scenes, as if economic salvation were just a few names away on a sign-up sheet.
El Dorado Drive refers to more than a location. It is a mirage: a place where the dream of ease and upward mobility still flickers, just enough to keep the engine running on fumes. In Megan’s telling, it’s not the promise that corrupts, but the persistence of belief in the promise, long after it has expired. The sisters are not victims, exactly. They are participants in a national pathology: the belief that reinvention is always possible, that past prosperity can be recovered if one simply works harder, believes deeper, plays by the new, unspoken rules.
In the end, the novel functions as both thriller and x-ray, exposing the soft tissues of American decline: the rituals of self-deception, the commodification of empowerment, and the way that desperation often wears the face of hope.
There are whispers in El Dorado Drive that resonate with what many of us may feel about the state of our nation today. Like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, the story could be a dramatic overlay, perhaps a magnifying glass to bring the uncomfortable issues of our times into stark relief.
Megan Abbott’s noir is not about murder, it’s about moral erosion, played out in quiet cul-de-sacs and manicured salons, where the real crime is the lie we keep telling ourselves about the future.