One of Us Is Dead

Jeneva Rose’s One of Us is Dead (2022) is a psychological thriller and murder mystery set in the affluent neighborhood of Buckhead in Atlanta. Its title refers to the death of one of its five point-of-view characters, though it only reveals which character dies two-thirds of the way through. The novel touches on the careful cultivation of public images by a wealthy elite and the ways in which individuals can challenge or outgrow their personas. It celebrates female friendships while critiquing the impact of social hierarchies on communities of women.

This guide refers to the 2022 Blackstone Publishing e-book edition.

Content Warning: This novel touches on domestic abuse, anti-gay bias, and the forced prostitution of women.

Plot Summary

One of Us Is Dead is a murder mystery set in Buckhead—an affluent enclave in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. Its central characters are a predominantly wealthy group of female friends whose social hub is a beauty salon called Glow. For these women, image is everything. Their lives appear perfect from the outside, until a series of upheavals throws their carefully crafted identities into disarray.

The novel opens with two mysteries. Someone has been killed, but the text doesn’t identify the victim, Olivia Petrov, until the last quarter of the book, leaving readers to wonder not only who the killer is but also who has been killed. In the chapters set in the present, Detective Sanford grills Jenny, Glow’s owner, as part of the official investigation, trying to discover the murderer. The police investigation isn’t the only dissection that takes place during the novel. Most of the main characters struggle to define themselves outside of their husbands or, in Jenny’s case, place of business. They interrogate their relationships, the power dynamics of their society, and their own natures.

The story of the murder and subsequent investigation is told from multiple perspectives. It opens with a portion of Sanford’s interview before jumping back to a day three weeks before the murder, when several of the other characters meet Crystal, a new arrival to Buckhead. Thereafter, the text alternates between a linear narrative of the events leading up to Olivia’s murder and short sections of Jenny’s post-murder interview. There are five point-of-view (POV) characters, each of whom acts as the first-person narrator of her own chapters: Jenny; Karen Richardson, the owner of a successful real estate firm and wife of Mark Richardson, a plastic surgeon; Shannon Madison, the recently divorced ex-wife of Congressman Bryce Madison; Crystal Madison, Bryce’s younger new wife; and Olivia Petrov, the novel’s scheming antagonist and wife of the mysteriously wealthy Dean Petrov. Jenny’s employee Keisha, while not a POV character, plays a central role in the plot and in the character development of both Jenny and Karen.

The novel seems to privilege Jenny as a source of truth. Her work affords her extraordinary insight into the lives and feelings of her clients. Until the closing pages, she is the only character known to survive the novel, and it is implied that she knows the murderer as well as the victim. In fact, four of the POV characters—Jenny, Karen, Crystal, and Shannon—conspire to kill the fifth, Olivia, with some help from Keisha. It is revealed that Jenny was never called in for an interview with the police. She initiated the conversation and has been deliberately stalling and obfuscating. After Dean kills Bryce and the murder is “solved,” the final chapters frame flashbacks to the night of the murder with a scene at Jenny’s salon, in which the surviving characters demonstrate the newfound strength of their relationships.

The dissolution of Bryce and Shannon’s marriage and his subsequent marriage to the much younger Crystal sets the novel in motion; it unsettles the main characters’ social circle and forces them to reexamine their relationships and positions. Olivia seizes upon the current fluidity to try and replace Shannon as the leader of their friends and Buckhead’s organizations. Crystal tries to find a more positive social role for her to inhabit than “home wrecker” or “gold-digger.” Karen realizes that something is deeply wrong in her own marriage. Jenny’s salon becomes a contested ground in the passive-aggressive war Olivia wages on Shannon. Finally, Shannon has to discover who she is outside of her marriage, a journey she initially resists as she tries to force a reunion with Bryce.

In the first three quarters of the novel, each of the main characters receives a significant shock, and the way that they handle it shapes the narrative going forward. Jenny and her salon are attacked (on the covert orders of Olivia), and as a result she reevaluates her priorities—particularly her decision to substitute a professional life for a private one.

Later, Shannon is publicly humiliated and rejected by her ex-husband Bryce Madison. After Olivia cruelly posts video of the incident online, Shannon sees herself from an outside perspective, leading her to realize that she needs to move on and believe in her ability to be a strong, independent person outside of her marriage.

Karen discovers that she is gay and begins an affair with Keisha, Jenny’s best friend and employee. Not only is their relationship instrumental in bringing down Olivia, the novel’s antagonist, but it also helps Karen develop greater self-confidence and a willingness to prize authenticity over the approval of others.

Olivia finds out that her husband’s finances have recently declined. When she confronts him about it, she learns that his wealth derives from illegal activities, though he doesn’t specify what those activities are. She then attempts to blackmail Karen by threatening to reveal her relationship with Keisha.

Crystal stumbles upon detailed evidence of her husband’s human trafficking operations on his computer. She also learns that Dean is his subordinate in the enterprise, and Bryce has threatened to harm Olivia as a way of ensuring Dean’s loyalty and obedience. Horrified, she shares this information with Olivia, who uses it to blackmail Bryce into giving her $500,000 and a cut of the business. Crystal also shares the information with Shannon, who resolves to help Crystal put an end to Bryce’s business.

All these events lead to Crystal’s housewarming party, at which the other women murder Olivia. Their plan requires Jenny to seek out the lead detective once Olivia’s body is found and stall him. They rely on Dean’s hotheaded nature and Bryce’s threat to Olivia’s life to provoke Dean into blaming Bryce and killing him, leading to his own prison sentence. They believe murder is the only way they can bring the three wealthy antagonists to justice.

Jenny’s salon, Glow, is the spatial center of the novel. Much of its narrative takes place there, and it comes to represent the image-conscious community of wealthy women who frequent it. The novel uses this setting to deepen its examination of Social Performance and Image Construction as a defining feature of Buckhead’s world. The salon also offers characters a supposedly safe space in which to discover themselves, but that haven is twice breached: once when Olivia orders the attack on Glow and once when she barges into a private treatment room to discover Karen and Keisha’s affair.

In the last lines of the novel, Jenny asserts that Olivia was a “cancer” in their community that had to be killed. The remaining characters are now tightly bound together and move into the future with firm resolutions about who they want to be.