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Synopsis:
It’s multi-level murder in this darkly funny mystery novel about the glamorous world of MLM “huns”—and the dangerous secrets at the top of the pyramid.
Drew thought she was destined to rise above her small New Jersey hometown and make it as a serious journalist in New York City. But now she’s back in Clearfield, pushing thirty, newly single, and living with her father.
After a chance encounter at the grocery store, she reconnects with her former best friend, Steph, who married young and never left their hometown. But Steph looks . . . good. She’s tanned, clear skinned, and glowing. She drives an expensive car and wears only name brands. What’s her secret? A multi-level marketing scheme called LuminUS that’s taken the ladies of Clearfield by storm. With nothing left to lose, Drew gets sucked into this glamorous world of downlines, sales parties, and girls’ trips.
But when a LuminUS distributor dies under mysterious circumstances, can Drew uncover the dark secret at the heart of the organization—and save her best friend—before it’s too late?
Laugh-out-loud funny and a pitch-perfect skewering of pyramid schemes, Death in the Downline is a page-turner that will have readers nodding in recognition and cheering for Drew until the cathartic conclusion.
Review:
I have been a fan of Maria Abrams since her first novella, She Who Rules the Dead, was published by Weirdpunk Books. When I learned through her Instagram that she is releasing her new novel through Quirk Books, I preordered it before I was offered an ARC through NetGalley. I could not have been more excited to get the ARC and read it in less than two days.
The novel centers around Drew, a woman down on her luck. She just broke up with her boyfriend, lost her job at Buzzfeed due to budget cuts, and is now returning from New York back to her childhood home in Clearfield to live with her father. She has no money, and even though she applies for jobs on her phone all of the time, she has no prospects. One day she is shopping at the store when she runs into Sarah, her high school friend, whom she had lost touch with in college. Sarah seems to have the perfect life, marriage, kids and money. Sarah has convinced Drew to join LuminUS, a multilevel marketing company selling beauty supplements. Before long, Drew spends money she does not have and is trying to keep up with the selling strategies set by Sarah and those up the chain of command. She is not the type of person who completely buys into the business of LuminUS, and it does not take long for her to question the entire company. The women dying around her does not help.
Death in the Downline is a fast paced, fun book. Drew is an empathetic character, and we are on her side the entire time, having the same questions that she has. While Drew starts to investigate the deaths around LuminUS, she does not really have a hard time getting information. We also do not get much sense of risk in Drew poking around in shady dealings of a multimillion dollar business. I feel like this lack of peril that Drew feels, like there will be nobody to kill her even though they are killing those around her, makes the novel, especially the latter third where she is really getting information and pushing for more, feel soft. Most of the people involved want to talk to her, tell her everything going on, even if they know that they are in danger as well for telling their story. Drew getting information seems a little easy, and this keeps the final scenes from being too tense. I enjoyed Death in the Downline, and I had a good time reading it. Getting into the world of MLM and knowing that none of them really are anything more than ploys to milk desperate people from their money, is an interesting topic to think about. I like Drew and Sarah as friends, and even some of the other ladies selling LuminUS are good people in a bad situation. In the end, the fall of LuminUS does not cause enough danger for Drew, the biggest whistleblower.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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