Item: Best Offer Wins
Rating: 4
Author: Catherine

Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino
Published by Celadon Books
Publication date: November 25, 2025
Genres: Book Clubs, Debut, Fiction, Contemporary, Suspense

Bookshop

For anyone who’s purchased a house in a competitive market the subject of Marisa Kashino’s novel Best Offer Wins won’t come as a surprise: the lengths a buyer will go to win the house of their dreams. Think buying a home is just about paying the price the owners are asking for it? Then you’ve been lucky to miss the hoops that prospective buyers have to jump through in high-demand real estate markets. However, what I thought would be a humorous satire about a relatively innocuous part of adulting went a different way entirely.

Margo is a successful PR person in Washington, D.C. She and her husband have been looking for a home so they can start a family, but they’ve been outbid multiple times and are out of options until their realtor mentions a house that isn’t on the market yet. It’s going to be listed in 10 days so they might be able to get a jump on the property before it goes up for sale. Margo goes to the house and makes her first questionable choice—scaling the fence to see into the back of the house and the backyard. What she sees convinces her this is the house that will lead to the perfect lives she envisioned for them. But how to see the inside when it hasn’t been listed yet? Using all of her skills and experience as a tech-savvy PR maven she not only stalks the owners online via social media, but manufactures accidental meetings at the places they frequent. From there, she uses a key similarity between herself and the family to ingratiate herself. Overly enthusiastic, but not creepy and all fairly innocuous, until Best Offer Wins goes right over a cliff.

Kashino lulls the reader into complacency over Margo’s little forays into the sellers’ lives. It’s only as her chances of actually getting the house start to diminish that her tactics and decisions veer into problematic territory. As the pages pass and the drama increases, Kashino showcases how expectations and desire can lead people to behave in ways that are completely unexpected. A startling byproduct of the plot is how the increasingly intrusive nature of technology exacerbates this kind of bad behavior, elevating it to dangerous levels. It all comes together for messy, propulsive reading (of the kind that screams Netflix limited series). I was expecting fluff before I started and got something much darker, but I still couldn’t put Best Offer Wins down.

Looking for more addictive fiction on the darker side of real estate? Try A Pleasure and a Calling!

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