New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winner Matt Goldman’s A Good Family is a gripping, emotional thrill ride about the secrets hidden underneath a picture-perfect neighborhood.
Katie Kuhlmann’s marriage is falling apart. But she has a secure job, her children are healthy, and her house, a new construction in the prestigious Country Club neighborhood of Edina, Minnesota, is beautiful. She can almost ignore the way her husband, Jack, has been acting–constantly checking his phone, not going to work, disappearing from the house only to show up again without explanation.
Tension in the Kuhlmann house only gets worse when Adam “Bagman” Ross, a mutual friend from college, happens to be in the neighborhood and in need of a place to stay. Jack is quick to welcome him into the sanctity of their home, but Jack’s strange behavior only gets worse, and Katie fears their new guest is also harboring a dark secret. As she begins to uncover the truth, she realizes that something is terribly wrong–and she must race to protect her family as danger closes in.
A Good Family will be available on May 30th, 2023. Please enjoy the following excerpt!
CHAPTER ONE
This, thought Katie. This is what it’s all about. Family time. Sitting in the nook they’d built for these moments, informal and intimate, just the four of them isolated from the outside world in a cocoon of dark walnut benches and matching table. Filamentbulb sconces cast their warm glow against a wall of white beadboard. And the aroma of cooking drew them from bedrooms and basement along with Katie’s texts on the family chat. Dinner’s ready! Wash your hands, please! The nook created a sanctuary for conversation. Tell me about your day. Children’s questions, jokes, teachable moments, and a sharing of opinions crisscrossed to form the emotional scaffolding called family that would support them in good times and bad. That was the idea, anyway.
“Nice job, Kaleb.” This from Elin, a twelve-year-old vegetarian who trained herself for tween warfare by using her eightyear-old brother like an axe uses a sharpening stone. “You’re eating the muscles and guts of cute animals.”
“I am not. Mom, tell her I’m not.”
“Well,” said Katie, “you’re not eating the guts. I promise.”
Kaleb took that as a victory. Elin rolled her eyes and said, “Dad. Tell him.”
Katie’s husband, Jack, wasn’t listening. He was lost in a spreadsheet on his laptop.
“No devices at the dinner table, Dad,” said Elin in a voice both scolding and mocking since no devices at the dinner table was a rule laid down by Jack.
“Sorry, honey,” said Jack. “Something’s blowing up at work.”
Kaleb leaned over and looked at his father’s screen. “Whoa! That’s a lot of numbers. Do you have to add all those up?”
Katie said, “Since when do you go over spreadsheets, Jack? You have people for that.”
Jack looked at Katie over the screen of his laptop. His mouth was hidden but his eyes said back off. He was so touchy lately when it came to work. When it came to everything, really. Jack had his dream house now—he was supposed to be happy. Not angry. Not anxious. Not short with his wife. He had never given her a look like that before. And the kids had a point. No devices at the dinner table included Jack’s devices, so Katie said to him what she often said to the kids. “It’s okay to feel grumpy. It’s okay to feel tired. It is not okay to be rude.”
Jack dropped his eyes back to his spreadsheet, and Kaleb said, “Them’s the rules, Dad.”
“Yep,” said Elin. “Them’s the rules.”
Jack sighed and shut his computer.
Imperfections aside, thought Katie, this was a moment for which they’d built the nook. It was the only element of the addition/remodel that Katie had insisted upon. “I want a nook in the kitchen for family time,” she’d told Jack. “Like a booth in a restaurant for just the four of us.” The addition/remodel itself was Jack’s baby. He found the architect, the contractor, oversaw the budget, stopped by the house every day during construction. To keep his wife happy, one might say, or to keep her from weighing in on the rest of the project, another might say, Jack obliged her the nook.
The Kuhlmanns lived in Edina, Minnesota, in a neighborhood called Country Club on a street called Browndale in a house called perfect by friends and neighbors and drivers-by. Country Club had large homes best described as stately and lawns that looked like they’d all been mowed on the same day and, in the winter, sidewalks so free of snow and ice you’d think elves shoveled in the dead of night. Jack’s architect and interior decorator and landscape designer worked with him to create a home so inviting you had to wonder who hadn’t walked through to see the honed marble countertops and family photos, the five-panel doors and kids’ artwork on the refrigerator, the blown-glass light fixtures and stateof-the-art laundry room complete with a custom-built wooden cage for the family’s dirty clothes.
Two years ago Jack gave himself an obscene bonus after a fiscal year when his company developed a sodium-sulfur battery that solved two problems that had prevented sodium-sulfur batteries from powering electric vehicles. Jack’s company eliminated the battery’s corrosiveness and reduced its operating temperature from 300 degrees to 200 degrees, which is in line with the running temperature of most combustion engines. The big plus of making batteries from sodium and sulfur is that, unlike lithium and cobalt, the elements are plentiful and don’t need to be purchased from countries that do terrible things to good people.
The new sodium-sulfur battery attracted huge investment in Jack’s company from automobile manufacturers, public utilities, and organizations all over the world who had declared war on fossil fuels and human rights abuses. Jack’s company raised over $1.2 billion, and the battery wasn’t even on the market yet. But the money poured in and some of it built the house on Browndale. When they moved back in Jack said, “The only way I’m moving out of this house is when I’m carried out and loaded into a hearse.”
Jack was proud of his new abode and he felt especially excited to show it off because that evening, after nook time with the family, the house would fill with neighborhood couples for book club—the first book club the Kuhlmanns would host since the remodel/addition.
Proud is not the word to describe how Katie felt about the house. Better words would be undeserving, embarrassed, ashamed even, because Katie Kuhlmann did not grow up with wealth. She married into a life of privilege, which made her life a hell of a lot easier for her than it was for most people. She worked hard as a mother and at her job at General Mills but this kind of extravagance was gifted from Jack, who grew up with old money, his family making their fortune in lumber when Minnesota was still just a territory. Jack built the remodel/addition as a fortress to preserve that gift, to keep the privilege inside and random cruelty of life outside.
It worked.
Almost.
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