The Cage
In the opening scene, two women are descending in an office tower when the power goes out, trapping them in the dark. When the power comes back on and the elevator is opened on the ground floor, one of the women is dead. She’s been shot.
Was it suicide, or did the other woman kill her? That’s the question that occupies the rest of the novel.
Both of the women worked for a high-end fashion conglomerate with offices on the 30th floor. Both entered the elevator at the same time. The dead woman is Lucy Carter-Jones, the company’s HR manager, one of its key executives. The other woman is Shay Lambert, one of the company’s corporate lawyers.
The police interview Shay at length, of course, asking her what happened in the elevator. They also interview Lucy’s family and co-workers. As conflicting evidence accumulates, the balance between the two theories—suicide or murder—shifts back and forth. Various characters want to sway the answer one way or the other. Some of them don’t want the police to look at Lucy’s possible reasons to commit suicide. Others argue that Shay would have no reason to kill Lucy, and in fact her motivation would run the opposite way.
The further the investigators dig, the murkier the story gets. Everybody has secrets they are desperate to keep hidden.
This book is full of twists and suspense, taking readers on a roller coaster to land at a final solution. It was one I couldn’t put down, starting it in the afternoon and finishing the same evening.
This is Bonnie Kistler’s second novel. Her first, House on Fire, was published in 2019.
She’s always wanted to be a writer. As a teenager, she actually sent a novel to a major New York publisher. (It was quickly returned with a terse noteL “We don’t accept unsolicited submissions.”) She completed an Honors degree in English literature from Bryn Mawr, writing her undergrad thesis on Wuthering Heights.
She then decided to become a lawyer and obtained a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She spent her law career in private practice in Philadelphia with major law firms, for whom she successfully tried cases in federal and state courts across the country. She draws fully on those experiences in her novels. (Her advice to would-be novelists: “become something else first.”)
Her next novel, already finished, is scheduled for release in 2023. Like the others, it features a smart woman lawyer. And she’s working on another, a “dark, twisty mind-game” set in Florida.
She and her husband now live in Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina. They have two daughters.