Title: Counterfeit

Author: Kirstin Chen

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: The Borough Press

Publication Date: 9th June 2022 (Hardback)

Rating: 5/5

Cover:

Summary:

Meet Ava: rule-abiding lawyer who has ticked all of life’s boxes. She’s married to a successful surgeon and has just taken an indefinite career break to raise her adorable toddler. A picture-perfect life.

Meet Winnie: Ava’s old college roommate. Once awkward, quiet and apparently academically challenged, she left Stanford in a shroud of scandal. But now, she is charismatic, wealthy and has returned to town dripping in designer accessories. An actual perfect life.

When the two women bump into one another at a local coffee shop, it seems like fate has intervened: Winnie’s new-found success is courtesy of a shady business and she needs a favour; Ava is realising she is not built for the stay-at-home life. But what starts as one favour turns into two, then three, and soon Ava is in far deeper than she ever imagined.

Now Ava has to make the ultimate decision: cut and run, or risk it all?

Review:

As soon as I read the premise of Counterfeit I was excited to read it and, pleasingly, I loved it just as much as I’d hoped! The story follows Ava, an ex-lawyer, stressed mum of a toddler and wife to a successful surgeon. When Winnie, Ava’s old college roommate, suddenly inserts herself back into her life, Ava is pulled into Winnie’s moneyed world of luxury and a shady (admittedly ingenious) counterfeit handbag business.

Counterfeit is just the sort of book I adore – it’s smart, sexy and razor sharp with a story I was completely and utterly invested in. I don’t want to give too much away but I have to say how impressed I was with the route this fabulous book took – nothing is as simple as it first appears, there are layers of nuance and social commentary that build up slowly but surely throughout. Ava is not a one-note heroine and Winnie is a complex antagonist. Together they make Counterfeit a brilliantly assured and compelling novel that draws the reader in and then twists the narrative beautifully. I couldn’t recommend Counterfeit more highly, it’s one of my favourites of the year so far and Kirstin Chen has a new fan in me!

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Thank you so much to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for inviting me on this tour and organising it. I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.

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