Smart, funny, and forced-supervised, HBO's “The White Lotus” is a rare TV satire that humanizes the often quirky fo while balancing vicious and empathetic, skewering the super-rich. The series is just closing its third season and follows a formula that is as familiar as addictive. A flock of wealthy and malicious tourists dream of escape, only to find that the very problem that they had wanted to escape is quickly and mercilessly closed.
Part of the joy of the show is that it was able to make these fateful holidays look so appealing. Life will burst, relationships will fall apart, people will die, but you still want to be there. If you're not entirely prepared to check out the White Lotus, you have 10 novels that guide the spirit of the show, from ruthless depictions of money-filled vacationers to murdering mystery set in high-end resorts.
If you want to open it with a corpse
By Amina Akhtar
Like the white lotus of Thailand, Sedona, Arizona, has a reputation for spirituality that attracts all kinds of masters, yogis, so-called wellness enthusiasts. Their pretenses are withered in this comic stripe about Pakistani American Ronnie, a Pakistani American, who tagged a desert enclave along with life coach Marley, who became her friend. It will not be long before the dark side of paradise reveals itself in the form of a corpse. Akhtar has a keen eye to the hypocrisy of the elite of Namasteess and no vampire facials.
Lucy Foley
This mystery novel, lying between the past and present, is more than just a whodunit. The story begins with a murder, but Foley hides the identity of the victim and explains the body in ambiguous words before rewinding to the beginning of the week. The cast of this locked room drama is made up of nine 30 friends from Oxford University who gather at the remote hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands for the annual Big Year Day party. When the raging Blizzard locks up the group, secrets, lies and betrayal all bubble to the surface, making the question of who will die and who will kill becomes more and more interesting.
By Emma Rosenblum
At Rosenblum's Salcom, a fictional summer vacation for the rich in the heart of Fire Island, tennis pros steals, beloved wife lies, everyone flips their bad mouths and sleeps with everyone else. Rosenblum represents the complex rivals and obsessions that ping this corridor-like idyllic with the harshness of anthropologists, and conveys in sharp detail how this web of complex relationships escalates in all ways from problem to theft and murder.
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If you like rich people behaving badly
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Carl Fletcher, a second-generation immigrant and owner of a polystyrene factory, is invited out of a Long Island home one morning. He eventually returns with one piece, but trauma, although he refuses to acknowledge it firmly, has had the impact of the past few decades and is looming as he transitions the lives of his three children into adults. Like “The White Lotus,” this novel by Brodesser-Akner, author of The New York Times Magazine, is part of the way that money doesn't solve your problems, and that even the most interrupted efforts to not only reconstruct them, but to maintain the veneer of the breakdown and resolve the breakdown, are doomed to fail.
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By Alice Berman
Alex Sable is like a 20's nobleman from a maker who has adapted to the subtle gradation of his class. The blazer is from J. Crew, and is the teacher of the billionaire, who is more dead than anything other than Brunello Cucinelli. When the novel begins, Alex himself is dead and caught. His wrist was slashed and Patek Philippe's watch was found in the bathtub at his New Hampshire mansion. Berman uncovers the story of the noise behind the obvious suicide, trying to unravel the mystery of his death through the eyes of a podcaster.
By Muriel Spark
Few writers could dissect the rich as sharply as Scottish novelist Muriel Spark. Her most enthusiastic “Memento Mori” tells the story of a group of wealthy British people who are thrown into existential crisis by a series of threatening calls that could be the literal embodiment of criminal plot, mischief, or death. (In a typical spark, it's probably a combination of all three.) The characters are trivial, overlapping, contemplative, and somehow strangely sympathetic. It's a sour and funny book as clever as they come.
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If you need a far-reaching locale
By Christine Mangan
In 1956, Moroccan Tangia and housewife Alice Shipley, a housewife who struggles to find herself, is sucked into a twisted whirlwind when her enigmatic college roommate Lucy Mason unexpectedly appears at the door. The book's sun-kissed environment and transparent unrestiness are reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, with traces of “golden notes” in Canny renderings of early feminism in the aftermath of World War II. However, as the novel gains violent momentum, the tension held is pure “white lotus.”
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By Christopher Boren
The premise seems charming: Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow with a semi-human settlement in a palace hotel in Luxor, Egypt, spends her time at the end of the co-mut blockade by trying to “releasing” the unfortunate couple by slightly interfering with them. But her prank takes a dark turn when she creates an unlikely nemesis. An 8-year-old boy named Otto is too involved in cat and mouse games to get corrupted. Bollen's storytelling coincides with “The White Lotus” of I-can't-believe-just-there nerves.
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By Agatha Christie
Long before Mike White let the killer loose in the Super Rich, Agatha Christie made that career. He staged rock room mysteries one after another in exotic regions around the world, closing the ensemble with Taekwon, socialites and other members of the Upper Last. One of the mode's most famous and most beloved novels, and perhaps the closest cousin to “The White Lotus” is “Death of the Nile,” where Poirot, famous Belgian detective Helschur, discovers that he misses the clue of vacationers on a gorgeous river cruise.
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If you want to stay on a Thai theme
By Sarah Ox
Scuba divers, influencers and hard-party tourists gather at the charming Koh Sang resort in this sophisticated holiday thriller. There is an unspoken rule between the expat community of Koh Sang that no one has peered into the past, among the expat communities of permanent expats. However, when bodies begin to appear on Thailand, it becomes clear that some of the residents' past is not being done with them. The Ochs draw out the lush details of the idyllic environment, and even as the body steadily rises, the island remains oddly attractive.
