Posh by Jon Malysiak
What's It About?
Posh, Book One of The Templeton Family Chronicles, introduces readers to a world of power and privilege, where nothing is sacred, where alliances are made and destroyed based on who has the most to offer and who can afford the highest price tag.Posh: Book One of the Templeton Family Chronicles is a juicy debut novel about a long-standing English dynasty newly steeped in searing personal crises as it prepares to host the social event of the year. It’s Steeplechase Weekend at Templeton Manor in Dorset, UK, but not like it’s ever been. Carlton Templeton, patriarch of the family, is dying. His unscrupulous partner is clawing her way to money that isn’t hers and all the power she can wrangle by marrying the widowed Carlton before he dies. One of his four grown children appears to have just set off a diplomatic scandal and possibly ruined his relationship with the only sibling he loves. A possible daughter no one knew existed shows up at the manor house on a rainy night in combat boots and denim shorts to claim her piece of the inheritance pie. As festivities begin, reporters and intelligence operatives scramble to the scene and no one’s secrets feel safe.
Malysiak divides the story into two parts, with the first, entitled Goa, unraveling the principal incendiary incident. Forty-something Guy Templeton wakes up hungover and disoriented in a Goa, India hotel. He’s fled there from Moscow after an evening with the “pear-shaped” eighteen-year-old daughter of the UK’s Ambassador to Russia, an evening that by some accounts has managed to set off “one of the worst diplomatic crises since the end of the Cold War.” The rehash and backstory are told primarily from Guy’s perspective but two other characters enjoy their own point-of-view chapters: Guy’s best mate Spencer Hawksworth, a buttoned-down do-gooder who works for MI-6 and Yvette Devereux, a feisty Frenchwoman with fiery red hair who works in French military intelligence. Spencer loves Guy like a brother but Guy’s current mess makes Spencer wonder “whether he wasn’t outgrowing his childhood friend whose arrested development seemed very nearly lethal … .The best of everything came too easily.” Spencer faces his own struggles too. Hiding an unrequited love for Guy’s sister Chloe, Spencer finds resisting the feisty Yvette almost impossible, even though “… when Yvette came to town trouble was usually never far behind.”
GORGEOUS PROSE
Part two, entitled The Templeton Way, brings everyone back to the Dorset manor, where sibling rivalries and horse races alternate with power grabs, love trysts, professional spying and amateur sleuthing. Desperate measures by a colorful cast of dynamic characters keep up the high pace, with some that make you laugh and others so evil you worry for the family members. Admittedly, the Templeton heirs and their partners focus more on the indulgences that get them through the day — long hot baths drawn by the help, a spot of whisky or a puff of some mind-altering substance as needed, sumptuous repasts of mouthwatering food that appear when called for—than they do on love and connection. But in Guy and Chloe you find no shortage of insight and self-awareness. Chloe, youngest of the four, is, like Spencer, reevaluating her relationship with her beleaguered brother Guy, as well as life without her dying father and her own legacy. Guy feels disappointed that no woman has proven his equal so far, but is painfully self-aware, as in this: “Privilege made Guy who he was. And yet, he couldn’t help but think this same privilege would also prove his undoing.” Their stuffy older brother Edgar figures less in the story but not so his wife the “corn-fed Midwestern-born Penny Danziger.” Having used Edgar as her “bus ticket out of Nowheresville, USA” to become Lady Penelope Templeton, she resists her gauche American instincts in a family that discounts her right and left. The insufferable eldest daughter Diana, smartest of her siblings by some accounts and caregiver to their father, is no happier but determined to keep her place. And fighting every minute to dethrone all the heirs is Carlton’s partner Eliza. Ironically Eliza is nothing without her ex-nun, ex-con alter ego Sister Francine, whose motives — “….saving the world. Ridding the planet of venom. Spreading the fear of God to the heathen.” — demand horrifying measures that upset even the selfish Eliza.
Beyond actual and would-be family members swarm friends, influencers, spies, reporters, drug-dealers, whose ethics and backstories go all over the map. The raven-haired Svetlana Slutskaya is the ruthless widow of a Chechen warlord and central to Guy’s diplomatic scandal. The diminutive Bangladeshi barmaid named Sunny Joy Whatever—who dresses like “a bargain-bin Imelda Marcos” and sports a scar from an acid attack—tries to be Guy’s guardian angel. Rebecca Hastings, who towers over her very short celebrity chef husband as half of Britain’s most dynamic culinary duo, is sexually involved with not one but two of the four Templeton heirs.
Posh brims with gorgeous prose that is saucy and satirical, and point-of-view that is deliciously embedded in every word a character speaks. Full of sharp wit, clever dialogue and plotting reminiscent of Shakespearean relationships that live on the dark side, Posh: Book One of the Templeton Family Chronicles is an unputdownable story that begs for Book Two.
