Whisper Network

YA author Baker (Alive) makes her adult debut with an engrossing, bracingly funny thriller. For too long, fear of career suicide has kept the women of Truviv, a Dallas-based athletic apparel brand, quiet about Ames Garrett, the company’s general counsel, known throughout the company as a sexual predator. With Ames’s promotion to CEO imminent, three of Truviv’s female attorneys—dynamo Sloane Glover; down-to-earth, recently divorced Ardie Valdez; and overwhelmed new mom Grace Stanton—inch toward finally taking action. Sloane starts by adding Ames’s name to a high-visibility, supposedly anonymous online spreadsheet, the Beware of Asshole Dallas Men list. When a shaken Katherine Bell, the legal department’s freshest hire, complains to the trio, also members of the department, that their boss has become sexually aggressive with her, Sloane persuades Ardie and Grace to join her in taking legal action. The women get more than they bargained for in the ensuing fireworks, which include a death and a lawsuit. Baker, a corporate lawyer and the mother of a toddler, clearly knows her protagonists’ conflicting professional and personal worlds, though she goes a bit overboard with plot twists toward the end. This empowering novel is sure to resonate with many readers in the #MeToo era. Agent: Dan Lazar, Writers House. (July)