The housing market has never been more terrifying. Not because of rising interest rates or bidding wars that stretch into absurdity, but because Marisa Kashino has weaponized suburban real estate anxiety into one of the most compulsively readable debuts of the year. Best Offer Wins takes the universal frustration of house hunting and transforms it into something far more sinister, asking a question that will haunt you long after the final page: How far would you actually go for the life you think you deserve?
When Desperation Becomes Its Own Character
Margo Miyake is not someone you would immediately recognize as dangerous. She is a thirty-seven-year-old publicist living in a cramped DC apartment with her husband Ian, stuck in the purgatory of an overheated housing market. After eighteen months and eleven lost bidding wars, she receives a tip about a perfect house in the affluent suburb of Grovemont. The property is not yet listed. The sellers are motivated. This could be her chance.
What begins as understandable desperation slowly curdles into something unrecognizable. Kashino excels at this slow-burn transformation, laying breadcrumbs of Margo’s escalating behavior so naturally that readers find themselves nodding along until suddenly, horrifyingly, they realize they have been complicit in rooting for something monstrous.
The brilliance lies in how relatable the starting point feels. Anyone who has ever refreshed Zillow at midnight, who has written heartfelt letters to sellers begging them to choose their offer, who has calculated exactly how many meals they could skip to stretch their down payment further, will recognize the seed from which Margo’s obsession grows. Kashino does not merely depict housing anxiety; she understands it intimately.
A Narrator You Cannot Trust But Cannot Abandon
Margo Miyake joins a lineage of compelling unreliable narrators, but what distinguishes her is the specific texture of her justifications. She does not hide her manipulations from the reader. She explains them, contextualizes them, and invites you to see the twisted logic that makes each escalation feel inevitable. Her voice drips with self-awareness that somehow makes everything worse.
The first-person narration creates a claustrophobic intimacy that proves difficult to escape. Margo addresses readers directly at times, pulling them into her schemes as though they were old friends sharing gossip over cocktails. This technique could feel gimmicky in lesser hands, but Kashino wields it with precision, implicating readers in ways that feel genuinely uncomfortable.
Margo’s backstory unfolds in carefully measured doses throughout the narrative. Her childhood trauma, the foreclosure that shattered her family, the bullying she endured as a Japanese-American girl suddenly thrust into poverty among wealthy classmates, all of this contextualizes without excusing her present-day actions. Kashino respects readers enough to let them hold multiple truths simultaneously: that Margo was wounded, that she is sympathetic, and that she has become something genuinely frightening.
The Architecture of Suspense
Structurally, Best Offer Wins operates like a pressure cooker with a faulty valve. The tension builds incrementally through thirty-seven chapters that shift between present-day scheming and flashbacks that illuminate how Margo arrived at this precipice. Each chapter ends with a hook sharp enough to draw blood, making the book nearly impossible to put down.
- The pacing accelerates steadily without ever feeling rushed
- Plot twists arrive organically from character decisions rather than contrivance
- Flashbacks serve multiple narrative purposes, building sympathy and dread simultaneously
- The final act pivots into genuinely shocking territory while remaining earned
Kashino demonstrates remarkable control over information, revealing details at precisely calibrated moments for maximum impact. She trusts her readers to follow breadcrumbs and rewards that trust with payoffs that feel both surprising and inevitable.
Where the Foundation Shows Cracks
The novel is not without its weaknesses. Ian, Margo’s husband, remains somewhat underwritten throughout. While this could be intentional, meant to reflect how Margo sees the people around her as obstacles or tools rather than fully realized humans, it occasionally creates a flatness in the domestic scenes that should crackle with more tension.
Some secondary characters similarly feel more functional than dimensional. The homeowners Jack and Curt serve their narrative purpose effectively, but their characterization leans heavily on type rather than depth. Their daughter Penny, while charming in her precocity, exists primarily as a symbol of the domestic life Margo craves.
The satirical elements, while biting and often genuinely funny, occasionally overwhelm the darker psychological undercurrents. Kashino clearly has things to say about class, privilege, and the absurdity of the housing market, and sometimes those observations compete for attention with the thriller mechanics rather than complementing them.
A Former Journalist’s Eye for Detail
Kashino spent seventeen years as a journalist, most recently at The Washington Post, where she oversaw real estate and home design coverage for Washingtonian magazine. This expertise saturates every page. The specificity of bidding wars, the psychology of open houses, the particular desperation of the DC suburban market, none of this feels researched because it has been lived.
This insider knowledge elevates Best Offer Wins beyond simple domestic thriller into something approaching social commentary. The housing crisis is not backdrop here; it is catalyst, co-conspirator, and ultimately indictment. When Margo observes that houses in desirable neighborhoods sell for hundreds of thousands over asking with all-cash offers, the horror is recognizable because it is real.
Thematic Depths Beneath the Suspense
Several themes interweave throughout the narrative, creating resonance that lingers:
- The commodification of domestic happiness and its psychological toll
- Class mobility as both promise and prison in contemporary America
- The ways childhood trauma echoes through adult decision-making
- Marriage as performance versus partnership
- The specific pressures facing women approaching forty without the traditional markers of success
Kashino handles the racial dynamics with particular nuance. Margo’s Japanese-American identity shapes her experiences without defining her entirely. The microaggressions she encounters, the assumptions made about her, the way she is lumped into a generic Asian category by white acquaintances, all ring painfully true without becoming didactic.
The Dark Humor That Cuts
What elevates Best Offer Wins above similar psychological thrillers is its genuinely sharp wit. Margo’s internal commentary on the absurdities of upper-middle-class aspiration lands with satirical precision. The cocktail party conversations, the competitive parenting observations, the particular flavor of DC professional culture, Kashino skewers it all while maintaining the thriller momentum.
This humor serves a strategic purpose beyond entertainment. It keeps readers aligned with Margo even as her behavior becomes increasingly unhinged. We laugh with her at the ridiculousness of writing love letters to homeowners, at the performative desperation of the house-hunting process, and that laughter creates complicity that the novel eventually uses against us.
Verdict: A Propulsive Debut Worth the Investment
Best Offer Wins succeeds as both entertainment and commentary, a genuinely difficult balance to achieve. As a Good Morning America Book Club Pick and one of ELLE’s best thrillers of 2025, it has earned its accolades through sheer momentum and dark intelligence. Kashino announces herself as a voice to watch, bringing journalistic precision and novelistic imagination into productive collision.
The book does not entirely escape genre conventions, and readers seeking psychological complexity on par with literary fiction may find it occasionally prioritizes plot over depth. But within its chosen framework, it excels consistently and sometimes brilliantly.
Readers Who Devoured This Will Also Enjoy
For those who relished Margo’s descent, consider these similarly compelling reads:
- My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing: Another marriage concealing dark secrets beneath suburban polish
- Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid: Sharp social commentary with thriller elements and similar class observations
- The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine: Ambitious women using manipulation to achieve their goals
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney: Complex female narrators navigating desire and deception
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: The template for unreliable narrators in domestic settings
- Anxious People by Fredrik Backman: Another take on how real estate can drive people to extremes
Best Offer Wins marks Kashino’s fiction debut, and based on this evidence, the literary real estate market should prepare for another bidding war when her next novel arrives.
