Best Offer Wins

Best Offer Wins (2025) is a satirical thriller by Marisa Kashino. It follows protagonist Margo Miyake as she engages in a series of escalating acts of deceit and subterfuge in her efforts to purchase the ideal home and start a family. Darkly comedic in tone and featuring a complex, often unreliable narrator, Best Offer Wins satirizes the world of high-stakes real estate as it interrogates The Consequences of Unscrupulousness and Deception, The Myth of the Picture-Perfect Family, and The Dangers of Consumer Capitalism.

Prior to becoming a novelist, Kashino worked at The Washington Post and The Washingtonian, covering home design as well as the competitive Washington, DC, real estate market.

This guide is based on the 2025 hardcover edition by Celadon Books.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of sexual assault, graphic violence, cursing, a reference to death by suicide, and death.

Plot Summary

Margo and Ian have been searching for a house for more than 18 months, as they are tired of living in a small, cramped apartment. The DC real-estate market is brutal, and they have lost out to a series of cash offers that were well above asking price. Ian has begun to lose hope, but Margo remains determined to purchase their dream home and then have a baby. When she hears from their realtor that a place that is in their price range is about to hit the market in their favorite neighborhood, Margo decides to take matters into her own hands.

She scopes out the house. When one of its owners, Jack, finds her in the front yard, she hastily makes an excuse, explaining that she was out for a run, got lost, and then fell. Having successfully navigated her way through that first potential hiccup, Margo develops a plan. She learns the name of Jack’s yoga studio and engineers a meeting in his class. Margo knows that Jack and his husband Curtis adopted their baby, so she pretends that she and Ian are also interested in adopting. When Jack invites her and Ian to dinner, Margo is thrilled but Ian is hesitant: He argues that Margo is engaging in unethical subterfuge by trying to befriend Jack and Curtis, but he reluctantly agrees. The dinner goes disastrously, as Jack and Curtis realize that Margo and Ian are potential buyers hoping to sway them into selling their house off-market.

Ian is mortified and gives up on the house, but Margo is unfazed. She decides that if winning over Ian and Curtis is no longer an option, she will try blackmail. Although she now works in PR, Margo’s background is in journalism and she is no stranger to online sleuthing. She researches Jack and Curtis, hoping to find something compromising. Jack is, like Margo, self-made. He comes from humble origins and seems like a genuinely decent human being. Curtis, a professor at Georgetown, is the beneficiary of inherited wealth: His father runs a prominent hedge fund. Further research reveals an ominous Amazon review for Curtis’s book, admonishing readers not to trust him. Intrigued, Margo decides to dig deeper into Curtis.

Margo spends so much time researching Curtis that she makes several large mistakes at work. Her boss Jordana tells her to take a few days off and that, when she returns, they will meet to discuss her performance. Margo pushes worries about getting fired aside, lying to Ian that she is still going in to the office. She contacts Erika, a friend from her journalism days, to see what Erika can find about Curtis. Erika has access to databases that Margo does not. Through Erika’s research and her own detective work, she finds the name of a student, Dottie, who disappeared after having a troubling experience in Curtis’s class. Margo resolves to track Dottie down and find out what exactly went wrong between her and Curtis. She meets with Jordana and learns that she will be able to keep her job, but Margo devotes many of her subsequent work hours to her own research into Curtis and continues to give her job only part of her attention.

Margo travels to the small town Dottie seems to be hiding in and finds her, living under an assumed name. She learns from Dottie that Curtis stole the entire first chapter of his book from her: He plagiarized one of her papers and then had his wealthy father buy her silence. Dottie was ashamed that she had taken the money, but as a student from an under-resourced family funding her own education, she needed it. Margo, who also paid her own way through school, sympathizes with Dottie but also realizes that Dottie might be the key to purchasing Jack and Curtis’s home: If she could persuade Dottie to give her a copy of the paper, Margo could blackmail Curtis. She asks Dottie if Dottie will share the paper, but Dottie refuses. Undeterred, Margo decides to go ahead with the blackmail anyway. She has all of the information she needs and can lie about having an actual copy of Dottie’s essay.

When Margo returns home, she finds an unfamiliar flip phone on the counter. She reads through its message history and learns that Ian has been having an affair. This information enrages Margo; she begins to follow Ian and his girlfriend, a young, recent college graduate named Alex. Although Margo is furious with Ian, she realizes that she needs him in order to have a baby and purchase the dream home. Buying the perfect home and becoming a mother are more important to Margo than having a happy marriage, so she decides not to leave Ian. She confronts him, he apologizes, and she pretends to forgive him. Margo also confronts Curtis, who initially seems to believe that Margo truly has a copy of Dottie’s paper. She demands that he and Jack sell her and Ian the house off-market, but Curtis explains that he cannot do that without alerting Jack to his plagiarism. He asks that she and Ian make an offer as soon as the house goes to market, telling her that he will find a way to convince Jack to accept.

Several problems then arise at once: Margo discovers that she is pregnant, the house goes to market, Margo learns that Ian is still seeing Alex, and Jack and Curtis tell Margo and Ian’s agent that they are going to review the offers that come in over the weekend before accepting one. Angry, Margo decides to escalate her subterfuge. She brings her neighbor Natalie to Ian and Curtis’s open house and has Natalie walk through alone. She has a plan, she just has to execute it perfectly. She tells Natalie about Ian’s affair, gets her drunk, and steals a large wrench from her house. Margo does not reveal, at this point, what she does next, but she is next seen lugging a large suitcase into Jack and Curtis’s home.

Margo and Ian are at home when the news breaks: A body has been discovered inside of Jack and Curtis’s home, and a car matching Natalie’s was seen in front of it. Ian recognizes Natalie’s car, and asks Margo what is going on. Margo then reveals to him the events that led up to her placing the suitcase in the house: She used Natalie’s wrench to kill Alex and put Alex into a suitcase. She then wore clothing that resembled Natalie’s and Natalie’s car to bring the suitcase to Jack and Curtis’s house. She killed Natalie, making it look like a potential overdose or death by suicide. She then planted evidence to make it appear that Natalie and Alex were in a relationship and that Alex had ended things, breaking Natalie’s heart. Ian is horrified and wants to tell the police.

Margo reveals her pregnancy to Ian and informs him that they will still be making an offer on the home. Its other potential buyers have retracted their offers, and Margo and Ian will be able to get the house. Margo and Ian are able to purchase the home. They move into it, bringing Natalie’s dog, whom Margo adores, with them. Ian appears angry, upset, and distant, but Margo doesn’t care. She has gotten what she wanted. Just as the novel ends, however, Margo finds a new burner phone in Ian’s bag.