It is the week before Thanksgiving and the Darlings are preparing to go out to the east end of Long Island for their annual Thanksgiving celebration. Work at Carter’s firm, Delphic, is wrapping up when news of the suicide of longtime family friend and the firm’s most successful funds manager reaches the family as does word of an SEC investigation targeting Mary’s hedge funds. Carter’s daughter Merrill is an accomplished attorney on her own; when her husband loses his job, he cautiously takes a job with his father-in-law’s firm and now finds himself thrown to the wolves to save the rest of the Darling’s and their empire. Many different pieces of the story, told from Delphic’s secretary to the SEC investigators to the investigative reporters working on the story, begin to emerge and readers get the feeling there is more going on than meets the eye. Even if they are able to guess how the book will end (and they will be partly correct), there is one final scene that may not surprise at first, but an “aha” moment will shortly follow.
The Darlings explores many layers of life and relationships, personal and professional in a very subtle way. Cristina Alger writes with the assuredness of a seasoned author and an elegance not often found in a first novel. The plot moves forward as Tuesday through Sunday of Thanksgiving week unfold hour by hour, quickly shifting characters, revealing their part in the plot, creating a very complex story. Even the most flawed and seemingly unappealing characters, among them Merrill’s brother-in-law, are written in such a way that we understand why they are the way they are even if we don’t like them. A compulsive read, perhaps a little long on the financial jargon and details, written with the feel of an insider’s eye.
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