In Best Offer Wins, Marisa Kashino blends elements of domestic thriller and satire to craft a narrative that is both suspenseful and darkly humorous. Using familiar domestic settings, domestic thrillers explore questions about societal norms and practices. Best Offer Wins offers a commentary on the idea of the perfect family, commodified desire, and the dangers of obsession.

Satirical domestic thrillers have exploded in popularity in recent years, especially since the publication of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl. Flynn uses an unreliable narrator (a key trope within the domestic thriller sub-genre) to satirize and critique marriage, media sensationalism, and the idea of the “perfect” spouse. Its protagonists lie to and manipulate one another, and as the narrative progresses it becomes apparent that much of their relationship is performative. Best Offer Wins also features an unreliable narrator and also satirizes picture-perfect family life by exposing the gulf between the appearance of Ian and Margo’s relationship and the reality.

Satirical domestic thrillers often employ violence and explore the impact of violent acts on individuals and their relationships. In Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer (2018), a Lagos-born nurse with a complicated family history helps her sister cover up an escalating series of serial killings. Like Gone Girl and Best Offer Wins, it is narrated in a lighthearted, witty voice but grapples with serious themes and issues. It additionally shares with Best Offer Wins an interest in the lasting impact of generational dysfunction and fraught family relationships, as its protagonists wrestle with the damage done to them by their father’s brutal parenting.

Many domestic thrillers center marriage within their stories, exploring the darker side of the institution and interrogating normative gender roles. Chandler Baker’s The Husbands (2021) is a popular domestic thriller that approaches the problematics of marriage from a decidedly feminist position. A retelling of Ira Levin’s 1972 classic The Stepford Wives, it follows an attorney whose marital frustrations lead her to seek guidance from a new group of strong, female friends, whose own marriages are not what they seem on the surface. Like Best Offer Wins, it explores marriage and domesticity within a contemporary cultural landscape filled with social media and sensationalism.

Class, affluence, and wealth have long been key targets of satirical literature. Best Offer Wins features self-made characters to explore the impact of growing up in under-resourced communities in a hyper-consumerist culture. Liv Constantine’s The Last Mrs. Parrish (2017) also engages with class within the setting of a desirable, affluent neighborhood. Like Best Offer Wins, it exposes the gulf between appearances and reality, asking readers to consider the hidden costs of desire and of associating wealth with happiness.