I really enjoyed this new cult thriller from Canadian author Catherine McKenzie! There have been some really great cult books this year so far but I loved that this one was formed by and for smart women with the intention of giving them advantages that men get all the time. Lots of great twists to keep the story interesting and a bit of a shocking end that I wasn't expecting - plus lots of great bad men getting what they deserve too! Perfect for fans of books like A special place for women by Laura Hankin. Much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

💅 ᑭᑌᗷ ᗪᗩY ᖇEᐯIEᗯ 💅

•••𝑶𝒖𝒕 𝒕𝒐𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒊𝒏 𝑨𝑳𝑳 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒔•••

▪️𝗣𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗝𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝗨𝘀
▪️𝗕𝘆 𝗖𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗠𝗰𝗞𝗲𝗻𝘇𝗶𝗲
▪️𝟯𝟮𝟬 𝗣𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀
▪️𝗣𝘂𝗯: 𝟴/𝟮𝟯/𝟮𝟮

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ • 5/5 stars

Happy book birthday to the fabulous @catherinemckenzieauthor ! 🥳 I fell in love with this author in 2020 after listening to her whip-smart cultish thriller "You Can't Catch Me" narrated by the amazing Julia Whelan. I have since been making my way through her backlist.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to receive an eARC of "Please Join Us" via @netgalley .

Please Join Us - which is also somewhat culty - is an unputdownable page-turner about a woman who gets in 𝒘𝒂𝒚 over her head with an elite "Women's Club".

Nicole is pushing 40, and life isn't turning out how she planned. She's in a rut. As a lawyer, the 'Boys Club' has prevented her from climbing the ladder at her job - despite her working harder than the men. At her wit's end, and with her job on the line, Nicole joins an exclusive club for powerful women: Panthera Leo. A "girls club in a boys world." The club promises to help women achieve success with the help of their pride...

...but what the club also promises, is much more malevolent. Nicole finds herself at the center of a cult-like group of women who will stop at nothing to get ahead . No matter who they have to step on (or whose dead body they have to step over) to get there.

This was fantastic!! 🙌 Absolutely loved every second. Twisty, engaging, and action-packed, told in first-person and past/present. Its not often I stay up half the night reading (I'm getting old, I need my sleep 😂). But I literally couldn't put this one down!! The bags under my eyes are proof! 👀

Thank you @atriabooks @catherinemckenzieauthor
@netgalley for my free e-copy in exchange for my honest review 💕

Nicole Mueller is struggling. She had been top of her class at Yale Law School, and she had been given an offer to a prestigious New York law firm. She had been fast-tracked to partner, but last year one of her clients had folded. She lost an important customer and lots of billable hours. Now her career is fast-tracked to nowhere, and she is put on notice by her mentor that if things don’t change for her, she may be asked to leave the firm.

Nicole’s husband Dan is also a lawyer but works as in-house counsel for a bank. He doesn’t have the crazy hours or the need for clients to bill, so while he makes less money, he has less stress. And they live in a large apartment that belongs to his aunt, who gives them a discount on the rent. But when his aunt passes away and his mother and sister let them know that they have designs on the apartment, Dan and Nicole know they need to find a new place to live, quickly.

One day, Nicole’s phone buzzes with an email. “Please Join Us,” the header says. It’s an invitation to an exclusive women’s networking group. The invitation was for a week at a dude ranch in Colorado, a chance for her to get out of Manhattan and bond with other successful women for friendship as well as personal and professional enrichment. She decides to go, justifying the time away from the office and the expense by telling herself that it will pay off with its own rewards, and hopefully some wealthy new friends in need of legal counsel.

Even before she gets to Colorado, when she’s on the plane remembering how nervous flying makes her, she meets her first fellow member. Congresswoman and former model Athena is sitting nearby and offers Nicole medication (which she refuses) and friendly conversation (which she gratefully accepts) to distract her during the flight.

At the ranch, Nicole meets the leaders of the group, former singer Michelle and businesswoman Karma. They had both reached international fame with their careers, and now they want to give back, offering strong women the chance to rise through the ranks of their careers with the kinds of networks and favors that men generally saved for themselves, so they created the group, Panthera Leo. The others at the ranch, besides Nicole and Athena, are another business owner, an actress, and woman whose financial know-how could make or break a company. They bond together through group and personal challenges, and by the end of the week the women are bonded and thinking of themselves as a Pride.

After the weeklong retreat, the women all go back to their lives, but the Pride meet together regularly to talk and support each other. And when Nicole finally opens up to them about her challenges at work and needing a new place to live, Connie steps up and offers not only one of the rental apartments she keeps in the city but also a new client who has been looking for new counsel. At the same time, however, there are demands from the others. A donation for a favorite charity, a signature for a petition needed by Athena, even a job for a young lawyer. The lawyer is from Harvard at least, but Nicole rankles at being asked to get involved with her firm’s hiring.

As Nicole gets deeper into the new case she was handed, she starts to have more and more questions about the group and its reach. At first, it seemed pretty harmless, just a way to connect to other powerful women. But as more is asked of her, she wonders just how far the Pride will go to get her to do what they want. And when The Test comes, and she’s asked to put her career and maybe even her freedom on the line, how far will Nicole go for the sake of the Pride? And if she does say no, will they use what they know about her to destroy her life?

Please Join Us is a twisty thriller from bestselling author Catherine McKenzie. It has a delicious cult flavor to it, with an element of menace that builds throughout the story. The book opens with the The Test, so that sense of imminent danger is strong right at the start, and then we head back to before Nicole knew about the group. Those stories unravel, intertwined, throughout, until after The Test, when Nicole has to decide what she really wants for her future.

I was really wanting to like this, but I was a little concerned about the culty idea. There is a lot that could go wrong using a cult-like group as the center of the story, but McKenzie navigates it all with ease and grace. I thought Please Join Us was as close to perfect a thriller as I’ve read recently. I was hooked in right away and never lost focus. I just wanted to keep reading, every single word, all the way to the end. Thriller fans will find a lot to love in this book, and a lot of fun surprises as well.

Egalleys for Please Join Us were provided by Atria Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but I also won a copy of the ARC through a Goodreads giveaway.

Rating: 4/5⭐️
Pub day: Today!

Does anyone else think there should be a genre called, “corporate cult suspense,” even if it’s just for this book? 😂

There were a few stress inducing moments that could fall into the thriller category, but overall this was just a tense story following high-powered women. Not a bad thing, but I find it’s important for my expectations to know when it’s a suspense vs. a true stress-inducing thriller.

Two days after finishing, and I still can’t quite land on how I feel about this book. The descriptions of NYC and Aspen were very well done. I also enjoyed the steady cadence, the cultish vibes, and the chess-like structure. It wasn’t fast paced, and I was never surprised by anything. But I did read it in two days, so it clearly had my attention.

If you decide to pick this up you should expect intrigue and some quizzical twists. Enjoy!

Thank you Netgalley and Atria Books for the digital arc. Opinions are my own.

You know we are always most vulnerable when things aren’t going our way. Nicole is slipping at work, needs somewhere to live and to sort things out with her husband. When she’s approached to join a private women’s networking group, she’s skeptical but willing to try it and find out if it can help her work situation. Her husband teases her about it being a cult but she is convinced it’s a networking group.

I will admit the group screamed cult at me and yet I could grasp the appeal. I was engrossed from the start and drawn in by the favor needed in the present and how Nicole would deal. A little bit a legal thriller, without the courtroom, a little but Me Too, and a whole lot of layers to keep you guessing. The plot never stalls and while it has one of my least favorite types of endings that needs a little extra explanation, I couldn’t put it down.

Nicole’s law career is on a downhill slide, and she and her husband are on the precipice of losing their coveted New York apartment. When Nicole receives an email asking her to join an exclusive women-only career networking group, she decides to take the plunge even with her husband's half-joking warning that it sounds like a cult. During the initial retreat with the group, Nicole feels drawn into the Panthera Leo fold. Upon her return, her career begins to turn around. With success around every corner, things become increasingly disturbing until Nicole decides to uncover the hidden cost of her upward career trajectory.

I’m not typically a fan of books with lawyers as main characters, but the women’s networking group storyline intrigued me. Nicole is a hard-working competent woman in a male-dominated field. As a woman who has worked in similar business environments, I could relate to the boy’s club mentality of her work situation and wanted her to succeed. The allure of Panthera Leo is patent, and the lines crossed in the name of winning make for an edge-of-your-seat plot that keeps you invested until the very end.

Read this one if you like fast-paced feminist thrillers that push the boundaries of what some are willing to do to break through the glass ceiling. It was fascinating to follow the progression of control and risk that Nicole and her pride sisters subjected themselves to in the name of career advancement.

Having just read a book about cults and cultish behavior, all the red flags were waving throughout this book. But are all cults bad? No, not really. A group that helps equal the playing field for women is a good thing, right? And when things start going wrong for Nicole, she grabs hold of the hand reached out to her by Panthera Leo, a group of powerful women all focused on helping each other be successful. Of course, things aren't that simple and as the twists and turns, and even a dead body turns up, Nicole starts to question what she got herself involved in. I am really enjoying the proliferation of books about powerful women working together, even when things are a little squirrelly. I loved that until the very end, the twists had twists of their own making for a very compelling page turner of a book!

This book hooked me with the introduction of a “boss babes” networking/cult - type group…but it quickly lost me with all that was going on.

Our main character Nicole is a lawyer in New York. Her career isn’t where it used to be and she’s approached by a group of highly successful women to join their womens networking group. The group was set to help women succeed the way men do - without a second thought about why they’re successful. She joins and things start to get weird.

But I found them also weird for me the reader. There was just far too much going on and I feel like a lot of loose ends. The characters weren’t particular fleshed out…I couldn’t remember who was who and it made me lost the plot a few times.

I love the idea of this book, but it took me a while to get through because I had to keep backtracking to figure out what was going on.

The ending surprised me for sure…but it was another instance of me being shocked and then confused.

It was very lawyer/business focused and I think that’s just not for me, but I can see why someone else might love this book.

Please Join Us
Author, Catherine McKenzie
Pub date: 8.23.22

Thank you @atriabooks and @netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this e-arc!

Please Join Us is a wild and thrilling ride filled with secrets, hidden agendas, deceit, and women who are determined to go after and even take what they feel they deserve. I stayed up way past my bedtime two nights in a row with McKenzie's fast- paced psychological thriller trying to piece together how Nicole was going to reclaim her life.

Nicole Mueller's life is stagnant- her marriage is becoming a little too comfortable, she and her husband Dan are being forced out of their beloved NYC apartment, and her law career is beginning to fall apart. Just when she begins to worry that she may lose her position at the firm that she's worked at since graduating, she receives a curious email from an exclusive all- women's networking group, Panthera Leo (PL).

Despite Dan's warnings that this secret organization sounds more like a cult, Nicole agrees to attend the upcoming retreat in Colorado, where she learns that the four other elite women, with whom she will be closely networking with, will be called a "pride." Nicole is impressed by the two women who run PL and is equally impressed with the four other women as she slowly begins to let down her guard and call these women her friends.

Once home, she is amazed at all the doors that begin to open for her as she aims to take back her position in the firm. Everything just seems to be coming together for her- finally.

But then one night, she receives a text instructing her to help one of the women at her apartment where she is to assist in covering up a serious crime. Always questioning, Nicole begins to take off her blinders and realizes that maybe this was all just too good to be true. Will she be able to remove herself from this disaster or will she remain trapped in the claws of Panthera Leo?

With themes of women empowerment, feminism, justice, and the #MeToo movement, Please Join Us is a must read for fans who love fast- paced thrillers with twists, turns, and a shocking ending!

I was pretty stoked to get a copy of this book. I have read most of her books now. Yup, I'm a fan, even if they were not all 5 star reads.
This book too me a moment to get into. It wasn't so easy to understand how it came about, but once the story got to a place where I was finally invested, it didn't stop. The twists of these women's lives and how they all got tangled up together turned out to be methodical and I devoured it. I could definitely sense what the author wanted the reader to feel in those moments.
A decent book that I am sure most of you will enjoy! 3.5/5

Nicole is having a hard time at work, and when she gets an email inviting her to a female networking event. Although she’s apprehensive, Nicole joins and suddenly has a “Pride” of women who have her back. Things are amazing until her Pride starts to demand favors in return.

Please Join Us is definitely exciting and moves quickly, but I found the characters pretty flat and the big reveal to be rather convoluted.

When a new Catherine McKenzie book hits the shelves, you can bet I am picking it up. She hooked me years ago with Spin, and I have read backlist and new releases ever since. Her craft is impeccable, and I'm never disappointed.

Please Join Us follows Nicole Mueller, a 39-year-old lawyer who has hit up against some rough spots lately. The partners at her law firm are scrutinizing her case load and earning potential. She and her husband are concerned they are going to have to move out of the apartment that they have lived in for 10 years, and loved. And she feels alone in the world. Until an email arrives, inviting her to join Panthera Leo, a women's networking group offering opportunities to go up against the "old boy's club" and succeed. She jumps in quickly, and finds herself at a secluded ranch in Colorado, with some powerhouse women, ready to set the world on fire. But who's going to get burned in the process?

McKenzie brings out the twists in this one. Right up until the end of this book, you're going to be wondering who is truly pulling the strings here. And who is going to come out ahead in the end. Well-paced, with characters that I loved to hate. This book earned a 4.25 stars from me... the ending let me down a little bit, but that last page sure had me questioning things.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I expected this to go one way and it did not. It zigged instead of zagged. Why do so many writers walk right to the edge of female inclusivity and then chicken out at the end? This did not empower like I hoped it would.

4.5/5

This was a captivating and unputdownable book. Catherine McKenzie has done it again by writing a twisty, mysterious and perfect thriller with quite the cast of strong female characters. It was a unique story but it was very entertaining. And that ending was mind blowing. Very well done!

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy.

Book wasn't really for me but I was blown away by how the author made all the pieces connect to each other. I can see myself recommending this book to customers looking for more brainy type thrillers.

This was a very interesting reading experience for me. I thought the premise was really strong: a group of powerful women (almost cult-like), working together to move upward in a man's world, but all is not what is seems. Any story that gives any sort of cultish vibes is an auto-read for me, and I expected that to be more of the case with this book. The first half of the story definitely gave that vibe, and although the pacing was a bit strange throughout the book, I was interested in where the plot was going. Unfortunately, once things start unraveling and we start finding out the truth, thats where things fell a bit flat for me. I wasn't a fan of the big reveal/explanation to the events happening throughout the story, I found it to be quite unnecessarily convoluted. Additionally, I didn't find any of the characters to be very well fleshed out and I didn't connect with any of them, let alone our main character Nicole. Overall, I don't think this is a bad book, it just wasn't my particular cup of tea!

I enjoyed this one and was hooked from the very start! It gave me Smile and Look Pretty Vibes! A group of powerful women banding together to take what they deserve in a man’a world. But man oh man! There is so much more going on in this one under the surface! This has been called a cultish book, I didn’t really see that, but it is definitely a group of (presumably) like minded women. I can’t say too much without giving away key plot points that you will want to read and find out for yourself. I enjoyed the then and now chapters, and how eventually every chapter turned into now chapters. The then chapters were imperative to build background on the women’s “club.”

This one comes out 8/23!

Panthera Leo, an exclusive women's networking group, promises life changing results. The high-powered members of each five-member pride take care of each other, doing what it takes to ensure that they all succeed. Nicole has never heard of the group before receiving an email from them, but she jumps at the sudden invitation to join.

The description was promising, but I had a hard time getting into this one. Nicole is tired because of men. She's angry because of men. Her husband doesn't have the same drive to succeed as she does and doesn't work as hard as she does. She's underperforming at her job. The apartment she and her husband love is being taken by another member of his family. She wants changes in her life and apparently isn't about to ask any questions about what she'll have to do to repay all of the favors the other pride members are doing for her.

The plot shifts back and forth between a present situation and a few months earlier when Nicole first joined the group. It builds slowly and by the time things really started to happen I didn't care if Nicole was going to be okay or not.

Please Join Us had a very unique story line and was very twisty! I devoured this book in a day and was shocked by the ending. This was my first book by Catherine McKenzie and I can’t wait to read more by this author! This checks all the boxes for the perfect thriller, secret societies, backstabbing friends and a strong female point of view. I loved this book!

What's it about (in a nutshell):
Please Join Us by Catherine McKenzie is a dark and twisted psychological thriller about Nicole Mueller's opportunity to level the playing field in a man's world.

Initial Expectations (before beginning the book):
The cover is fascinating. It reminds me of an old tv screen that's on an antenna and not coming in properly. I can't even begin to imagine what the cover tells me about the story, but it intrigues me nonetheless. I like the sound of a girls' club in a boys' club world since I'm all about empowering women, but the description describes something that may be too good to be true due to unrealistic expectations of the illegal and immoral kind.

Actual Reading Experience:
This is one of those stories that the less I say, the better your reading experience, so I will keep it brief.

I am both bothered and awed that this story takes women's empowerment to a dark and devious place from which I wondered if there is any retuning. A girls' club with equal power to the boys club is impressive, but is it good if it gets down in the mud with the boys? You will have to read this story to figure that out for yourself.
I loved the dark, creepy, and twisted ending most of all. It's everything I didn't know I wanted from the ending and so fun in that dark way. I always appreciate a good ending, and the darker and creepier in psychological thrillers, the better.

The twists and turns are out of this world, and the intelligence behind each move blew my mind. I love a smartly detailed plot with subterfuge and intelligence leading the way, and boy, this story delivered more than I ever could imagine. It all worked together to tell this deceptively dark story from the smallest detail to the bigger picture.

Characters:
Nicole Mueller is the main character and narrator. She is married to a loving husband, Dan, and they live in a rent-controlled apartment owned by Dan's great-aunt. Driven and determined are two words that come to mind immediately when thinking about her. She knows she is working in a man's world and will successfully navigate it until she can't.

Narration & Pacing:
Please Join Us is told in a dual timeline through Nicole's first-person narration. It flows beautifully and never gets confusing about which timeline you're in. The pacing is my favorite which is very focused and fast from start to finish. There is no putting this book down. Even once you finish, you will feel compelled to hold on to it a bit longer while you process what you read.

Setting:
The story is set in New York City, which suits it as the main character is a successful lawyer who graduated from an Ivy League school. I enjoyed how the author utilized different aspects of city life to increase the tension, and they were believable, which helped the pace stay very fast.

To Read or Not to Read:
If you are looking for a dark and twisted psychological thriller that will reverberate long after you close the book for the final time, Please Join Us is one you won't want to miss.