Mirkat Always Reading

Nine people check into a health resort in Australia, Tranquillum House.  Frances Welty, a romance novelist, is reeling from her publisher rejecting her latest manuscript and the discovery that the man she'd met online and had planned to marry had been catfishing her.  Jessica and Ben Chandler have been facing marital problems since winning a large lottery jackpot.  Heather and Napolean Marconi, and their daughter Zoe, are facing the three-year anniversary of the death of Zoe's twin Zach.  Tony Hogburn is a former athlete who has struggled with his post-sports life for 20 years.  Carmel Schneider feels puffy and dejected in the wake of her husband leaving her and immediately finding a beautiful new girlfriend.  Lars is an intensely handsome divorce lawyer who attends health retreats regularly.

Masha Dmitrichenko, the eccentric Russian expatriate who owns and leads Tranquillum house, promises the eight guests that after a ten-day stay, they will not be the same people they were when they checked in.  Through personalized protocols of exercise, nutrition, meditation, massage, and therapy, they are all to expect a transformation they could not have foreseen.

Ten years before, Masha suffered a heart attack that caused her to be technically dead for a short time.  In light of that experience, Masha left behind her stressful corporate job, remade herself through physical fitness and meditation, and founded the retreat.  She brought in as "health consultants" a former employee, Delilah, and one of the paramedics who helped her, Yao.

Without giving away the book's secrets, I will say that Masha's "protocols" take a turn nobody expected.  Once again, narrator Caroline Lee manages a Moriarty ensemble cast masterfully.  I found myself caring about all the characters and enjoying their interactions with one another.  As an aside, with Frances being a romance author, whose editor encourages her to change things up by considering writing a psychological thriller, there were some "meta" components that could have been self-indulgent and cloying, but Moriarty pulled them off, and I enjoyed them.