Smart, funny and compulsively watchable, HBO’s “The White Lotus” is the rare TV satire that strikes a perfect balance between vicious and empathetic, skewering the superrich while also humanizing their often outlandish foibles. The series, which just wrapped up its third season, follows a formula that’s as familiar as it is addictive: A flock of wealthy, ill-mannered tourists descends on a far-flung luxury resort for one week, dreaming of escape — only to find that the very problems they hoped to flee are swiftly and mercilessly closing in on them, with deadly consequences.
Part of the pleasure of the show is how it manages to make these doomed holidays seem so appealing. Lives implode, relationships crumble and people wind up dead, but you still want to be there regardless. If you’re not quite ready to check out of the White Lotus, we’ve got 10 novels that channel the spirit of the show, from ruthless depictions of moneyed vacationers to murder mysteries set at high-end resorts.
If you want to open on a dead body
by Amina Akhtar
Much like the White Lotus in Thailand, Sedona, Ariz., has a reputation for spirituality that attracts all manner of gurus, yogis and so-called wellness aficionados. Their pretensions are witheringly lampooned in this comic thriller about Ronnie, a Pakistani American who tags along to the desert enclave with her friend turned life coach, Marley. It isn’t long before the dark side of paradise reveals itself, in the form of a dead body — the first of many that soon turn up in various states of dismemberment. Akhtar has a keen eye for the hypocrisy of the namaste-espousing elite, and no vampire facial, jar of manuka honey or hot yoga session is spared from her mordantly funny wit.
by Lucy Foley
Flitting between the past and present, this mystery novel is more than a mere whodunit: Although the story begins with a murder, Foley conceals the identity of the victim, describing the body in vague terms before rewinding to the start of the week. The cast of this locked-room drama comprises nine 30-something friends from Oxford University who have assembled at a remote hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands for their annual New Year’s Eve party. When a raging blizzard traps the group inside, secrets, lies and betrayals all bubble to the surface, and the question of who will die — and who will do the killing — becomes more and more intriguing.
by Emma Rosenblum
In Rosenblum’s Salcombe, a fictional summer getaway for the rich in the heart of Fire Island, the tennis pros steal, the loving wives lie, and everybody bad mouths, screws over and sleeps with everyone else — sometimes all at the same time. Rosenblum charts the intricate rivalries and obsessions ping-ponging around this cloistered idyll with an anthropologist’s rigor, tracing in sharp detail how this complex web of relationships could escalate from affairs to larceny and all the way to murder.
Read our review.
If you like the rich behaving badly
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Carl Fletcher, a second-generation immigrant and the owner of a polystyrene factory, is kidnapped one morning, in broad daylight, outside his Long Island home. He’s eventually returned in one piece, but the trauma — which he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge — has repercussions that last decades, looming over the lives of his three children as they clumsily transition into adulthood. Like “The White Lotus,” this novel by Brodesser-Akner, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, is in part about how money doesn’t solve your problems, just reconfigures them — and about how even the most dogged efforts to preserve a veneer of normality and stave off a breakdown are doomed to fail.
Read our review.
by Alice Berman
Alex Sable is the kind of 20-something patrician in the making who is attuned to the subtlest gradations of class — a billionaire’s scion who knows in an instant whose blazer is from J. Crew, and who’d rather be caught dead than in something other than Brunello Cucinelli. As the novel opens, Alex is himself caught dead, found in the bathtub of a New Hampshire mansion with his wrists slashed and his Patek Philippe watch broken. Berman flashes back through the lavish bacchanalia of Alex’s last months, through the eyes of a podcaster trying to unravel the mystery of his death, to reveal the knotty story behind the apparent suicide.
by Muriel Spark
Few writers were as capable of scalpel-sharp dissection of the rich as the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, whose magisterial social satires remain relevant even half a century later. “Memento Mori,” one of her most assiduous, tells the story of a group of well-to-do Britons who are thrown into an existential crisis by a series of threatening phone calls, which could be a criminal conspiracy, a prank or the literal embodiment of death. (In typical Spark fashion, it’s probably a combination of all three.) The characters are petty, duplicitous, conniving — and also, somehow, strangely sympathetic. It’s an acidly funny book that’s as smart as they come.
Read our review.
If you want a far-flung locale
by Christine Mangan
It’s 1956 in Tangier, Morocco, and Alice Shipley, a housewife struggling to find herself, is sucked into a twisted whirlwind when Lucy Mason, her enigmatic college roommate, unexpectedly shows up at her door. The book’s sun-kissed setting and atmosphere of diaphanous unease are reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s a trace of “The Golden Notebook” in Mangan’s canny rendering of incipient feminism in the aftermath of World War II. But as the novel gains violent momentum, the tension that takes hold is pure “White Lotus.”
Read our review.
by Christopher Bollen
The premise seems charming: Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow taking up semi-permanent residence at a palatial hotel in Luxor, Egypt, passes her time during the tail end of the Covid lockdowns by attempting to “liberate” unhappy couples with a bit of meddling. Her mischief takes a dark turn, however, when she makes an unlikely nemesis: an 8-year-old boy named Otto, whom she engages in a cat-and-mouse game too irresistibly diabolical to spoil. Bollen’s storytelling more than matches “The White Lotus” for I-can’t-believe-they-just-went-there nerve, and when it’s not outright shocking, it’s outrageously, scandalously delightful.
Read our review.
by Agatha Christie
Long before Mike White set his murderers loose among the superrich, Agatha Christie made a career of it — staging one locked-room mystery after another in exotic locales around the globe and rounding out their ensembles with tycoons, socialites and other members of the upper crust. One of her best-known and most beloved novels in this mode, and probably the closest cousin to “The White Lotus,” is “Death on the Nile,” which finds the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot sussing out clues among vacationers on a luxury river cruise that turns deadly.
Read our review.
If you want to stay with the Thai theme
by Sara Ochs
Scuba divers, influencers and hard-partying tourists converge on the glamorous Koh Sang Resort in this sleek holiday thriller. There’s an unspoken rule among Koh Sang’s community of expats, known as the Permanents, not to pry into anybody’s past. But when dead bodies start turning up on the Thai island, it becomes clear that some of the residents’ pasts aren’t done with them. Ochs draws out the lush details of the idyllic environment, and even as the body count steadily rises, the island remains strangely appealing.
