Hustle

Hustle is the story of sixteen-year-old Kira Martin, a high-school bookworm whose culinary talents are prodigious. However, her home life isn’t as sweet as her brownies. After being abused by her mother’s boyfriend, she wakes up one morning in the mansion of a drug ring. She soon becomes the apprentice of Sise, the syndicate’s mastermind and, with the motherly advice of a stripper named Majik, she enters the luxurious world of art embezzlement. Wooed by her smooth, sophisticated partner Amir, Kira flies between London and Tehran. Soon, he forces Kira to re-examine her values and fight for dreams of her own.

A departure from male-centered crime novels, Hustle is built on Jungian psychological archetypes to speak to some of the challenges women face today: fractured homes, non-traditional gender roles, and imbalances of power. Kira is an accidental antiheroine who hustles to gain an independent, stable life and a newfound, hardworking “family.”