Looking for a sizzling thriller this winter? Anna Sophia McLoughlin has you covered.
Billed as “Succession meets Saltburn,” A Girl Like Us follows Maya, a former reality TV star who marries into the Sterling family, whose pedigree is like a cross between the British monarchy and the Murdochs media empire. Some look at Maya as a gold-digger, others as the American dream embodied.
But when her new beau Colin’s cousin Arianna — the heiress to the family’s immense fortune — turns up dead, all eyes turn to Maya. Not only does she learn she’s next in line to inherit, but she’s also the prime suspect.
As the entire Sterling family goes into lockdown at the family’s ancestral estate, Maya decides she has to figure out who really killed Arianna, and why a girl she never met tapped her to take her place.
Read on to get a taste of Maya’s mindset in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE.
While Maya enjoys the advantages of being a member of the Sterling family, there are aspects of the role she simply has no interest in. She obviously loves having next season’s clothes sent over by the best designers, automatically receiving invitations to the most prestigious galas, not to mention the widening gulf between her present reality and her past life. But she’s never relished the hothouse of their London operation, being part of that whole show. Until this moment, she thought she’d have the best of both worlds. She’d live in New York, with a new, fancy name on all her credit cards, a doting, ambitious husband on her arm — a player in the family firm but far from the intensity of the actual family, all the pomp and circumstance of Sterlingland.
Now Maya will have to perform for them. The Sterling family, with their exquisite taste and worldly knowledge and sky-high expectations. All this time in the air has made her hands swell, and she’s conscious of her new wedding ring tightening around her fluid-filled finger.
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It’s wrong to think this way, she knows. Right now, she should feel only sorrow over this Arianna, Colin’s murdered cousin. She should be supportive, ready to play the dutiful wife in the family pageant, ready to do whatever Colin needs. But Travis unnerves her, and now he and Colin are huddling over by the jump seats, carrying on the discussion of the crisis privately, and what Maya mostly feels is watched.
Maybe this really is just a “terrible coincidence,” that a murder occurred in the same city, around the same time Maya slipped away, telling no one when she left. Or what happened when she returned.
No one noticed her last night as she stood on the Agyros’s deck watching the speedboat full of SterlingCo executives and their wives travel out of sight, she’s sure of that. Once they were gone, Maya pulled her RAZR phone from the back pocket of her cutoffs and flipped it open to check the address one more time before she herself went ashore.
The message, from a blocked number: 6pm, Iguana Bar, 21 Calle Obredor.
Sneaking around had made her anxious, but it thrilled her a little too. Miss Mayhem stepping out in the world, relishing the humid heat, the bustling, anonymous streets. Just to be out in the world alone, no one knowing where she’d gone. It reminded her of times with her dad, driving away from the pawn shop with fat wallets, high on the latest grift.
But she hasn’t gotten away with anything this time, Maya reminds herself as she adjusts Becca on her lap, as she sips her drink and watches Colin confer with Travis, wonders what they’re saying.
Still. Secrets beget lies and lies beget more lies — her little venture last night is forcing more dissembling now.
Even in the supreme comfort and carefully maintained climate of the private jet, Maya’s palms have begun to sweat.
She tries to think — did anyone see her, walking through Puerto Vallarta at dusk, asking for directions? She’d worn a large hat and plain denim cutoffs. Did the bartender take any special note of her? She doesn’t think so — Spanish was Maya’s mother’s first language, and Maya speaks it without an accent.
No. Nobody knows where she went.
On the far side of the cabin, Colin and Travis lean toward each other. Maya watches them, trying to read Colin’s body language. She should have played it cooler, learned everything Travis knew — heard everything he’s telling Colin now.
Colin glances her way. His expression is hard to read. Is he annoyed that she cut off Travis’s inquiry with her rude comment about the Sterling family or just tired and worried and not really thinking about her at all?
She kisses Becca’s head, strokes her back. She considers going over to him, asking how it’s going, if she can help him talk anything through. That’s how they are in New York — they work out their crises together — everything from a misremembered reservation time to a big inventory f—up at her company. But she’s rooted to her seat, afraid to close the distance between them. Last night stirred up old feelings. Fears and longings she believed long buried. She worries she might betray herself somehow, that her insides are too volatile. Not just because she feels guilty about lying, she realizes.
There was a death in the family. A murder. When there’s a murder, everyone needs an alibi, and Maya doesn’t have one.
Excerpted from A Girl Like Us by Anna Sophia McLoughlin. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks Landmark. Copyright © 2025 by Anna Sophia McLoughlin.
A Girl Like Us by Anna Sophia McLoughlin comes out Feb. 11, 2025 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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