Frey Next to Heaven

The PROVOCATIVE new novel from BESTSELLING author of A Million Little Pieces
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-546-8
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Privilege, sex, scandal, and murder. The new novel from Sunday Times-bestselling author James Frey. 'Will be the novel on every beach towel this summer, all summer, everywhere' Esquire 'A deliriously over-the-top portrait of decadence on the brink' Bustle 'A Connecticut sex romp-cum-murder mystery' Vanity Fair Behind every great fortune, lies a great crime - Honoré de Balzac New Bethlehem, Connecticut. Picture-perfect lawns, manicured hedges, multi-million dollar homes. But beneath the designer yoga gear and country club memberships lies a darker reality. In this world of excess, Devon and Belle have it all - beauty, money, status. But they want something more. Something dangerous. Something that makes them feel alive. Their solution? A party - a meticulously curated gathering of New Bethlehem's elite, from a desperate ex-NFL quarterback to a hockey coach with a penchant for married women, and a ruthless Wall Street 'closer' who wields his wealth like a weapon. One night. Multiple betrayals. And a murder that will shatter New Bethlehem's carefully constructed facade. Fans of The White Lotus and Big Little Lies will be drawn into the dark underbelly of the American Dream - a world where money can buy anything, until it ruins everything. READERS ARE THRILLED, UNSETTLED AND SEDUCED 'Sharp, provocative ... Captivates with its blend of dark humour and social commentary' 'Dark, disturbing and funny' 'Transcends simple categorization - part thriller, part social satire, part moral fable - and the result is both entertaining and deeply unsettling' 'A mix of wit, mystery and dark undertone ... I couldn't put it down ... Perfect pool side reading' 'I deeply loved this book ... the ending slaps' 'Super fun and sexy summer read! Rich people behaving badly'

James Frey was called 'America's Most Notorious Author' by Time Magazine, and the 'Bad Boy of American Literature' by the New York Times. He has written multiple global bestsellers, including A Million Little Pieces, Bright Shiny Morning, and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. He has sold more than 30 million books, and his work is published in 42 languages. He lives in a small town in Connecticut.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frey, James

Leseproben

The Beautiful and the Rich

Devon often dreamed of punching her husband in the face. She didn’t necessarily want to hurt him. And he often didn’t do anything to deserve it. She was just tired of him. Of his voice, of his smell, the way he breathed, how he chewed, the way he sniffed, the way it sounded when he swallowed, that he picked his fingernails and sometimes dropped them on the bathroom floor instead of the trash can, that he both snored and farted while he slept. None of it was done to deliberately annoy her, and he didn’t know that any of it did. It didn’t matter. She wanted to punch him. Right in his rotten fucking face.

Like so many marriages among the one percent, and even more so among the one percent of the one percent, their marriage was one of convenience, a business relationship. They met when she was twenty-eight and he was thirty. At an art opening in Chelsea, New York City. The show was of highly sexual, abstract expressionist paintings made by a beautiful young French woman. It was called Nympho, and the paintings were believed, though the painter neither confirmed nor denied it, to be portraits of her and a series of wealthy older men with whom she had had affairs, one of whom was the richest man in Paris, another whose brother had been the President of France.

Devon had been working at the gallery for six years. It was the largest and most prestigious art gallery in the world, with three spaces in New York, and outposts in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each of them had three or four directors, essentially high-paid salespeople with fancy titles. At twenty-five, Devon had become its youngest director. Yes, she had an art history degree from Princeton, and yes she had grown up around art and the art world, and yes she was smart and capable and knew her shit, but none of those things really mattered. What mattered was that she was young and beautiful, and she had young and beautiful friends who would come to the shows, and she could sell extraordinarily expensive art to rich men who wanted to sleep with her. And occasionally she did sleep with one of them. Never to close a deal, but for the fun of it, the thrill, the feeling of power and agency it gave her, so she had a good story the next time she went out with her girlfriends. And she always made the stories better, made them what she wished had happened, instead of what usually did, which was five minutes of foreplay (if she was lucky), two minutes of sex (if she was lucky), thirty seconds of cuddling (far too long after the aforementioned performance metrics), and a quick exit.

As happened before every opening, Devon and the other directors studied the guest list. As with every guest list, it was heavy with bankers, hedge fund managers, private equity partners, their wives and girlfriends, the art advisors who helped them build their collections and make them feel important, other artists, friends and family of the artist. The directors only cared about The Money, as they called the various men who worked in finance. The Money bought paintings from them, and they only got paid when they sold paintings. All fourteen of the paintings in Nympho had already been sold. The waiting list for future paintings by the artist had 220 names on it. So in many ways the list for this particular show was irrelevant, but you could always sell The Money something else, and it was always interesting to see if any new names had become rich enough to be added to the list.

And there was a new name, Billy McCallister. Though she did not know Billy, his reputation preceded him. He was the son of a plumber from New Hyde Park, Long Island. He had gone to Exeter on a full ride and graduated at sixteen. From there he went to the Wharton joint undergrad/MBA program on a full ride and graduated at twenty. He immediately went to work at Goldman, who had started recruiting him when he was seventeen, and became the second-youngest partner in the bank’s history at twenty-four. At twenty-five, he was making twenty million dollars a year. He left Goldman at twenty-eight and started his own hedge fund. It was a spectacular success and his twenty million a year jumped to fifty million a year. And though he had not made any major art purchases yet, it was known that he was looking, and every gallery in the world wanted to land him as a client. He was thick, gruff, unpolished, rude, arrogant, aggressive, ruthless, and brilliant. His father, a physically imposing man known all over Long Island for his short temper, meaty hands, and wrench skills, never understood him. Until he died, when Billy was twelve, after mistaking a bottle of rat poison for Gatorade while he was drunk, he called Billy Little Mister Softie, and he routinely told Billy that math was for pussies, that real men did real work, with their hands, and with their wrenches.

Billy didn’t mourn his father. He didn’t cry when he heard the news, and he has never visited his grave, but the torment never left him. And he was determined to prove his father wrong. Billy understood that math was the governing language of the universe. That whatever you wanted in life could be provided by math, and that whatever you wanted to understand could be explained by math. And he vowed he would never be a pussy, as his father so lovingly branded him. He would be an AFL, an Asskicker for Life. A Great White Shark. A Silverback. An Alpha among Alphas. Nobody would ever fuck with him or demean him again, and if they did, he would respond in ways he never could with his father. He would use mathematics and his gifts in understanding and manipulating it, to build an empire, to become a King, or as close to a King as you could in America, which is a Billionaire.

He was well on his way when he and Devon met. The hours leading up to an opening can be frantic and stressful, so she had forgotten about him when the gallery doors opened. There was a huge crowd, a line that wrapped down 24th Street and on to 11th Avenue. The exhibition space, a huge open white room with thirty-foot ceilings, was teeming with people, all either rich or cool, and almost never both. Despite their advantages, rich people were rarely ever cool, though they spent huge amounts of money trying to achieve it. And cool people were rarely rich because they were lazy, and part of being cool is not giving a fuck. But rich people and cool people often interact because each has what the other wants. Whatever they were, rich or cool, very few of them were looking at the paintings. If you want to actually look or contemplate art, you don’t go see the paintings on opening night. Openings are some combination of cocktail party, fashion show, and peacock’s parade. Everyone’s currency, whether it is cash or cache, is on full display, and most people spend their time at openings checking each other out, judging each other, and gossiping about each other. And that was the case at the Nympho show. Except for one man, standing motionless in front of a painting, staring intently at a swirl of pink and orange and beige and brown bodies, all of them engaged in sinful activities with each other, a painting called A Night at the Office, believed to be the depiction of an orgy the artist attended with one of the Princes of Monaco. Devon saw him, and she was curious, and she made her way through the crowd, and stood next to him, staring at the painting without speaking. She knew if she stayed silent, at some point he would speak. So she did, she stood silently next to him and stared as the crowd drifted around them, and so he did, after two or three minutes, in a deep voice that sounded like a mixture of gravel, dirt, and menace.

I want it.

It’s already sold.

I don’t care. I want it.

I can’t help you.

Yes, you can.

I can’t.

Go tell your boss I’ll pay him five times more than whatever he sold it for.

It’s not about the money.

Yes, it is.

We try to place paintings in collections where they will be loved and protected and kept off the secondary market.

It’s about the money. Everything is about money. You of all people should know that, Miss FancyPants. Now please go deliver my message.

Neither looked away from the painting during the conversation. And unwilling to leave after his order, Devon stood and stared at the painting until he walked away, moving on to the next one. Part of her was enraged. Part of her was intrigued. Part of her was turned on. Nobody had ever called her anything like Miss FancyPants before. If people knew about her background, and she assumed most did, they never brought it up. It was an unspoken rule. One of manners, of discretion. He clearly didn’t give a fuck. And she kind of liked it.

And indeed it would be fair to call Devon Lodge Kensington a Miss FancyPants. She had grown up in Greenwich on an estate called Willowvale, with a very large ivy-covered stone house that was laughingly called a cottage on a very large piece of perfectly manicured land in the Greenwich Back Country, where homes stood behind gates and hedges and on lawns large enough for polo fields, which were not uncommon. Devon’s ancestors had come to America on the Mayflower. They founded a bank in New York, built a railroad empire, opened copper, silver, and gold mines. If there were such a thing as royalty in America, her family was royal. Not Kings or Queens, but close enough, similar to powerful Dukes or Duchesses. They didn’t run the country, but when a member of her family expressed an opinion to the people who did, which was rare, the opinion was heard. She had gone to Greenwich Academy, one of the best girls’ schools in the country, for nursery, elementary, and middle school. After GA, she...