What Luck

When the phone rings at five in the morning, Megan Delaney is already awake, standing at the top of the house, looking out at the Sandy Cove General Store, and the beach beyond. At the other end of the line, a stranger announces the unfathomable: Megan's store, a place that's been in her husband's family for generations, has sold a winning lottery ticket, a twenty million dollar windfall, of which Megan and her husband are entitled to one percent.

But who bought the winning ticket? Megan and her husband comb videos and make a list of their suspects, a news crew broadcasts outside the store, and endless speculation swirls, but as the days go on it becomes clear that the winner is biding his or her time before coming forward. Could the winner be Stevie Everett? A single mom raising two boys, sweet Tim and more troublesome Gabriel, Stevie works taking care of Megan's great aunt, then bartends at night to make ends meet. A winning lottery ticket is the lucky break Stevie's been waiting for her whole life. Or could the winner be Megan's sister Amy? Living in her father's tiny house, Amy was, for a decade, the pampered Los Angeles wife of a wealthy investor, until the FBI hauled him off to jail, leaving Amy with a million-dollar lawsuit. Now working at the local high school and getting free Botox from her dentist friend, Amy longs desperately for her old life. As spring comes along and the lottery ticket goes unclaimed, long-simmering tensions begin to boil, a band of teenagers hatch a plan, and an entire town is fractured under the pressure.

A brilliant, twisting, deliciously surprising story of fate, fortune and hope, What Luck is a masterpiece.