Complete at 84,000 words, GOOD CRIMINALS was recently one of twelve longlisted titles in the 2024 Crime Writers’ Association competition for unpublished titles.
This story will appeal to readers who enjoyed the lure into crime of Kristin Chen’s Counterfeit and Marissa Stapley’s Lucky.
Synopsis
They’re crooks, but they’re her family.
Upstanding Paige Prentiss’s family of white-collar crooks want her to commit a “small” crime to save her uncle from jail, but it means risking her clean police record and budding law career. They promise her it’s simple. All she has to do is destroy a file from the insurance company where she is an intern. When the perfect opportunity to shred the evidence appears, Paige decides to bend the law…just this once.
But amateurs make mistakes, and Paige gets arrested. Fired from her job and labeled a felon, she seizes the first job she can get to satisfy her probation officer’s demand. Her new workplace becomes a sanctuary from her shame until she realizes it’s a front operation and she becomes implicated in a deadly crime. Now, the question is how far she’ll bend the law to save herself.