Heather Taylor Ross

THE GOLDEN ONES is an adult thriller for fans of Liane Moriarty, The Guest List by Lucy Foley, and The It Girl by Ruth Ware and In My Dreams I Hold a Knife. Complete at 80,000 words, a dual timeline follows the lives of The Inkling Society, a writer’s group that formed at Vellavue Liberal Arts located in Montana. The society reunites for the first time ten years post graduation at a writer’s retreat in Montana to honor the memory of a student who died in an accident.

At 31 years old, Helen has wasted all the golden potential she once had as a young best-selling author. Broke, tired, and in a dead marriage, Helen knows how everything went wrong: Henry Wolfe.

Eleven years ago, Henry and Helen arrived at Vellavue and transformed into the gods of the creative writing department. As young, agented authors, they planned to expand their domain to the entire world, until Henry ruined everything by dying.

When Henry’s sister hosts a writer’s retreat in Henry’s honor at Henry’s favorite cabin in the wilderness of Montana, Helen jumps at the chance to return to the last moment when her life was going well. Stakes are raised when the sister announces that the first writer to finish a novel and sell it will inherit the estate.

Helen reunites with her college friends ten years since graduation, but the competition turns deadly as the cabin turns from oasis into prison as a grizzly bear stalks the writers and attacks come from all sides. Helen had meant to spend the week sinking into her creative self, but now she’s forced to confront that Henry’s death was not an accident, and figure out if the killer is someone new, or the same one from ten years ago. Is it the fantasy author that knows too much about deadly plants? The survivalist author, who knows seven ways to kill a man and make it look like an accident? The poet, whose lines are increasingly dark and twisted? Or the thriller author who studies true crimes for research?