New York, 1887. A lawyer named Bofinger arrives at Sheila Vaughn's door with devastating news: her husband Max Fargus is dead. But moments later, he delivers an even more unsettling twist, Fargus may still be alive, and his estate, his secrets, his very identity are now fair game for those cunning enough to seize them. What follows is a serpentine tale of financial speculation, marital betrayal, and the brutal arithmetic of reputation in Gilded Age America. Sheila finds herself trapped between a husband who may be corpse or con man, a society that demands her respectability, and a lawyer whose sympathy masks something far more calculating. Johnson weaves a world where money is the true religion, where a woman's worth is measured in dollars and decorum, and where every handshake conceals a knife. The novel crackles with the anxious energy of an era when fortunes could be made or lost by sunset, when the line between respectable citizen and swindler was thin as gilt. Max Fargus is a darkly compelling portrait of American ambition stripped of its inspirational mythology, a story about what happens when the pursuit of the dollar collides with the messy realities of the human heart.
