Maestra

Maestra

by L. S. Hilton
Maestra

Maestra

by L. S. Hilton

Hardcover

$27.00 
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Overview

A Note from the Author

With the cunning of Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, and as dangerous as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, the femme fatale of this Talented Mr. Ripley–esque psychological thriller is sexy, smart, and very, very bad in all the best ways.

By day, Judith Rashleigh is a put-upon assistant at a prestigious London art house.
By night, she’s a hostess at one of the capital’s notorious champagne bars, although her work there pales against her activities on nights off.
  
TO GET WHAT SHE WANTS

Desperate to make something of herself, Judith knows she has to play the game. She’s transformed her accent and taught herself about wine and the correct use of a dessert fork, not to mention the art of discretion. She’s learned to be a good girl. But when Judith is fired for uncovering a dark secret at the heart of the art world—and her honest efforts at a better life are destroyed—she turns to a long-neglected friend. A friend who kept her chin up and back straight through every slight: Rage.

SHE WILL CROSS EVERY LINE

Feeling reckless, she accompanies one of the champagne bar’s biggest clients to the French Riviera, only to find herself alone again after a fatal accident. Tired of striving and the slow crawl to the top, Judith has a realization: If you need to turn yourself into someone else, loneliness is a good place to start. And she’s been lonely a long time.

Maestra is a glamorous, ferocious thriller and the beginning of a razor-sharp trilogy that introduces the darkly irresistible Judith Rashleigh, a femme fatale for the ages whose vulnerability and ruthlessness will keep you guessing until the last page.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780399184260
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/19/2016
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 695,895
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

L. S. Hilton grew up in England and has lived in Key West, New York City, Paris, and Milan. After graduating from Oxford, she studied art history in Paris and Florence. She has worked as a journalist, art critic, and broadcaster, and is presently based in London.

Read an Excerpt

 
C H A P T E R   O N E   

If you  asked  me how it began, I could truthfully say that the first time, it was an accident. It was about six in the evening, the time when the city churns again on its axis, and though  the  streets above were full of the sharp wind of another piss-miserable May, the station was stuffy and humid, squalid, with discarded tabloids and fast- food wrappings, irritable tourists in garish leisure wear crammed amid the resigned, sallow-faced commuters.  I was waiting on the platform for the  Piccadilly line at Green  Park  after another  fabulous start  to another  fabulous week of being bullied and patronized  at my super- fabulous job. As the train on the opposite side pulled away, a low collective groan rippled through  the crowd. The  board showed that  the next Tube was stuck at Holborn.  Someone on the tracks, probably. Typical, you could see people thinking. Why did they always have to top themselves at rush hour? The passengers across the line were moving fast, among them a girl in crippling  heels and an electric-blue  bandage dress. Last season's Alaia via Zara, I thought. Probably on her way to the stinking tourist  traps  of Leicester  Square  with  the  other  rube  losers. She  had  extraordinary hair,  a great  cascading  plum-colored  mane  of extensions  with  some  sort  of gold  thread  bound  through them  that caught and held the neon light.

"Judeee! Judy! Is that  you?'

She started waving  at me enthusiastically. I pretended not to hear. "Judy! Over here!"

People were beginning to look. The girl had hobbled  precariously close to the yellow safety stripe.
"It's me! Leanne!"
 
"Your friend's waving to you," said the woman next to me, helpfully. "I'll see you upstairs  in a minute."  I didn't hear voices like  hers very often  anymore. I'd  never expected  to  hear  hers  again.  She  obviously wasn't going to disappear, and the train showed  no sign of appearing, so I settled  my heavy leather briefcase across my shoulder  and pushed  my way back through the crowd. She was waiting on the gangway  between the platforms.

"Hiya!  I thought it was you!" "Hi, Leanne," I tried gingerly.

She tripped  the last few steps toward me and threw  her arms around me like I was her long-lost sister.

"Look  at you!  Dead  professional. I didn't  know  you lived in London?" I didn't  point out that  this was probably because I hadn't  spoken to her in a decade. Facebook friends weren't really my style, nor did  I need to be reminded, ever, of where I had come from.

Then I felt like a bitch. "You look great, Leanne. I love your hair." "I don't go by Leanne anymore, actually. It's Mercedes now."

"Mercedes?   That's-nice. I   use  Judith    mostly.   Sounds   more grown-up."

"Yeah, well, look at us, eh? All grown  up."

I don't  think I knew, then, what that felt like. I wondered if she did, either.

"Listen, I've got an hour before work." Werk. "Do  you fancy a quick drink?  Catch up?"
 
I could have said I was busy, that I was in a rush,  taken her number like I was actually  going to call it. But where did I have to get to? And there was something in that  voice, strangely welcome in its familiarity, that  made me feel lonely and reassured at the same time. I had just two twenty-pound notes in  the  world,  and  there  were  three  days before payday. Still, something might turn up.

"Sure," I said. "Let me buy you a drink. Let's go to the Ritz."

Two champagne cocktails in the  Rivoli Bar, £38. I had twelve on my Tube card and two in hand. I just wouldn't have much to eat until the end of the week. It was stupid, maybe, to show off like that, but sometimes you need to show the world a bit of defiance. Leanne­—Mercedes—fished enthusiastically with a fuchsia shellacked nail extension for the bobbing  maraschino and  took a cheerful  slurp.

"That's dead  nice, thanks. Though I prefer Roederer  now, myself." Well, that served me right for being flash.

"I work round  here," I volunteered. "Art. In an auction house. I do Old Masters." I didn't, actually, but then I wasn't sweating that Leanne would  know a Rubens from a Rembrandt.

"Posh," she replied. She looked bored now, fiddling with  the swizzle stick in her drink. I wondered if she was sorry she had called out to me, but instead of feeling annoyed I had a pathetic feeling that I wanted  to please her.

"Sounds it," I said confidentially, feeling the  brandy  and  the sugar soothing their  way  into  my  blood,  "but  the  pay's  crap.  I'm skint, usually."

"Mercedes" told me she had been in London for a year. She worked in a champagne bar in St. James's. "Reckons it's classy, but it's full of the same dirty old gits. Nothing dodgy," she added  hastily. "It's only a bar. The tips are amazing, though."

She claimed she  was making two  grand  a week. "Puts weight  on you, though," she said ruefully, prodding her tiny belly. ''All that drink­ ing. Still, we don't have to pay for it. Pour it into the plants if we have to, Olly says."

"Olly?"

"He's the owner. Eh, you should  ome down sometime, Judy. Moon­ light  a bit, if you're broke. Olly's always looking for girls.  D'you want another one?"

An older couple in black tie, probably on their way to the opera, took the table  opposite  us. The woman   ran  her eyes critically  over Mercedes's fake-tanned legs, her shimmering cleavage. Mercedes swiveled in her chair,  slowly and deliberately  uncrossed  and  recrossed  her legs, giving  me and  the  poor old bugger  next to  her a flash  of black lace G-string, all the time staring straight into the woman's eyes. There was no need to ask if anyone had a problem.

"As I was saying," she said, when the woman  turned, beet-faced, to the cocktail  menu, "it's a laugh." Laff." The girls are from all over. You could look smashing, if you got a bit dolled up. Come on."

I looked down  at  my black  tweed  Sandro suit.  Nipped-in  jacket, flippy  little  pleated skirt.  It was meant  to look knowingly coquettish, professional  with  a little  Left  Bank  spin,  at  least  that's  what  I  told myself when I clumsily mended  the  hems for the umpteenth time, but next to Mercedes I looked like a depressed crow.

"Now?"
 
"Yeah, why not? I've got loads of stuff in me bag."

"I don't  know, Leanne."

"Mercedes."

“Sorry.”

“Come  on, you can wear  my lace top. It'll  look ace with  your tits. Unless you've got a date?"

No,” I said, tipping my head  right  back to catch the last drops of bubbles and angostura. "No, I haven't got a date."

Reading Group Guide

1. Discuss Judith’s childhood. How does her background shape her character?
2. At one point Judith reflects that “wealth creeps under your epidermis like poison. It invades your posture, your gestures, the way you carry yourself” (p. 112). Does wealth change Judith? Would she be different if she had been born rich? How does the novel portray people born into wealth?
3. Do you like Judith? Why or why not? What surprised you the most about her character?
4. Judith is never described physically in the novel. Why do you think this is? How do you picture her?
5. In the beginning of the novel Judith reveals, “Rage had always been my friend . . . Rage had kept my back straight; rage had seen me through the fights and the slights” (p. 64). At what points in the novel does Judith turn to rage? How does rage shape Judith’s decisions? Can you relate to her frustrations? Why or why not?
6. What does Renaud’s relationship with Judith reveal about her character? Did you guess where their relationship was going?
7. Discuss the portrayal of sex in the novel. How does Judith’s sexuality inform your understanding of her character? Would you react differently to the sex scenes if Judith were a man? Why or why not?
8. Judith is a woman who decides unapologetically to own herself—her body, her desires, her ambitions. In what ways does her character challenge conventional expectations for women? How did you feel reading her transgressive behavior? Is Maestra a feminist novel?
9. Judith relates to other women in a variety of ways throughout the novel. Were you shocked by how some of those relationships develop over the course of the novel?
10. On page 160, Judith tells us, “Later, I had a lot of time to think about when I’d made the decision. Had it been swelling inside me all along, waiting, like a tumor?” Was there one moment in the novel in which you saw her character change? If so, when? If not, why?

Interviews

Sex, Murder, Shoes

Female transgression has a consistent theme in literature. From Troilus and Criseyde through Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina to London Fields, it's a constant that The Woman Always Pays. Perhaps Becky Sharpe, my favourite heroine of all, might be said to get away with breaking the rules, but then all she has to show for a lifetime's scheming at the end of Vanity Fair is a pot of rouge and the brandy bottle. When I started to write my heroine in Maestra, Judith Rashleigh, I was interested in what would happen if a woman was allowed to be bad not because she is an avenging angel a la Lisbeth Salander, not because she is bitter or traumatised, but because- well, because she can. No one ever asks James Bond about his emotions. It turned out that Judith is capable of being very bad indeed.

Maestra also addresses another key question, which is why sociopaths always have to be badly dressed. Coming from a background as an historical biographer, the novel was a joyful experience for me, and I wanted to convey some of the aspirational escapism that I had thrilled to when reading books such as Shirley Conran's Lace as a teenager. As Judith moves closer to her goals, the locations, and the clothes, become increasingly glamorous. But I dislike the gendered categorization of fiction, and my aim was also to engage male readers with its plot (it has boats, and oligarchs, and guns!). Judith might not be an ideal role model, but Maestra is very much a book about pleasure, sensual and aesthetic. I hope it will prove as much fun to read as it was to write.

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