The Bottom Line: Voted the Year’s Best Domestic Thriller in the 2025 BestThrillers.com Book Awards.
GRQ (Get Rich Quick) begins in Los Angeles, where a mysterious financial advisor (who swears he’s not an unreliable narrator) begins by telling us about his client, Marlon. It seems that Marlon is an ideas man who purchased a home he couldn’t afford. As foreclosure notices slip through the mail slot, we gradually learn about a family tragedy that has shaken the family to its core.
Amid promises of sudden wealth from cryptocurrencies and other high-stakes gambles, Marlon insists that his next scheme will be the one that saves them. His wife, Viola, long-suffering and skeptical, clings to voicemails from a lost child. Their daughter Sarah, practical yet loyal, is torn between her father’s neediness and her husband Michael’s blunt warnings that Marlon is a liar and a thief. Viola’s father Charles bristles with disdain for his son-in-law’s endless excuses, while Marlon’s mother, sweet but naïve, is only too willing to lend him money.
Author Steven Bernstein builds this sneaky domestic thriller with addictive, vignette-like chapters narrated by voices that alternate between self-justification and raw emotion. Marlon himself offers absurd rationalizations for his lies while trying desperately to mask his own shame. Passages describing Viola’s actions, meanwhile, sharpen the emotional core of the novel, showing how grief distorts truth as much as deception does.
Bernstein’s strength lies in how he seamlessly layers humor, suspense and sorrow. On one page, we’re laughing at Marlon’s ridiculous schemes and evasions. On the next, the ground shakes — literally, as Los Angeles is rocked by earthquakes, and figuratively, as the family fractures under pressure. In chapters like A Big-Assed Gun, we get white-knuckled suspense. All the while, the fallout shelter beneath Marlon’s house becomes a perfect metaphor for secrecy, survival, and entrapment.
Can love survive deception? Can grief coexist with hope? Bernstein refuses easy answers. Readers who admire the tragicomic bite and examination of the American family ala Jonathan Franzen will find much to savor, though GRQ is a far more entertaining and propulsive read than anything Franzen has published to date. GRQ is more than just a satire of financial delusion or a pure play domestic thriller. It is also a story of love and grief, of the stories we tell to stay afloat when the ground itself won’t stop shaking.
