Good Girls Die Bored

by Elizabeth Little

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

“Perfect Elizabeth Little—fun but deep, slick but meaty, suspenseful and satisfying . . . totally recommended.”—Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series

A gripping, emotionally charged thriller with an unforgettable heroine from the acclaimed author of Dear Daughter . . .

“My name’s Juno Hardwick—and I’m here to save your life.”

Juno Hardwick’s a fighter—or at least she thought she was. A year ago, she had a promising career influencing national security policy at the highest levels. Then her father died and her life fell apart. Now she's in Los Angeles, rotting on the couch with her sister during the day, working as a bouncer at a bikini bar at night.

So when her best friend Min, a former CIA officer, invites her to join a high-profile security detail, Juno sees a way back to the person she used to be. It's a straightforward job: protect an investigative journalist whose exposés have made her powerful enemies, get her safely through a glittering museum gala, collect a paycheck. Mission accomplished.

But from the moment Juno meets her new team—an enigmatic ex-SEAL, a brilliant engineer, a failed actress, a retired FBI agent who hates her guts—something feels off. They're underprepared and out of sync, and the client, who made a career out of exposing other people's secrets, clearly has a few of her own. Meanwhile, Min's playing a deeper game than she's letting on, treating Juno less like one of the players and more like one of the pawns.

As the gala approaches, Juno finds herself fighting on two fronts, and while she’s used to dealing with enemies on the battlefield, she’s not prepared for traitors in her midst. In a world where everyone has something to hide—including herself—Juno is forced to consider the possibility that loyalty might be the deadliest weapon of all.

Release date: August 4, 2026

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 336

Sample

One

I don’t believe in divination. Not in seers, not in sibyls, not in spirits from the great beyond. I don’t smudge, I don’t scry. I don’t read tarot cards or palms. Leave your tea leaves at home. Don’t get me wrong—­if crystals and candles work for you, that’s swell. But I wouldn’t know my star sign if I weren’t in a city where your birth chart’s more important than your credit score. The closest I get to superstition is sticking with the same Starbucks order.

Doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s coming, though.

My name’s Juno Hardwick, and I’m here to save your life.

As a private security professional, it’s my job to look into the future. Call it what you will—­access control, target hardening, penetration testing, close protection—­at the end of the day, it all means the same thing: I determine what could go wrong tomorrow and make sure it doesn’t happen today.

There’s no magic to what I do. I simply systematically catalog any and all actual or potential conditions that could impact key individuals, objects, or objectives in an undesirable way. Then I prepare accordingly. That’s it. That’s the trick. I make a big long list of everything that could go wrong and work back from there.

Abracadabra!

It got me through boot camp, saved my ass a time or ten in Okinawa, kept me alive during my deployment to Afghanistan, when I managed to get myself attached to an infantry unit that couldn’t stand me, alongside a woman who didn’t trust me—­at least not at first.

Is it an elegant process? Nope. Fun at parties? No way. Not so great for the old noggin either, if I’m being honest, but whenever I bring it up with my therapist, she throws around phrases like “maladaptive behavior” and “textbook trauma response,” and yeah, sure, point taken, lady, but what do you want me to do about it? I use the tools God gave me. One woman’s generalized anxiety disorder is this woman’s superior situational awareness.

It’s automatic, instantaneous, visceral. A wash of heat across my cheekbones. A twist of my diaphragm. A lick of flame up the length of my spine.

F*** magic. I’m my own divining rod.

On the day this whole mess started, however, I was a headscarf and a pair of hoop earrings away from grabbing the nearest folding table and setting up shop as a psychic. Because I was beginning to think my boss would be more likely to listen to a made-­up dead person than a real-life woman.

“Look, I’m not asking you to call the cops,” I said, leaning one hip against the bar as my boss counted the till. “I can handle him myself. I’ll be real nice about it, too, promise.”

Mr. Tansuwan grunted. “That’s what you said about the last guy.”

“And look how that turned out.”

“With an assault charge?”

“Exactly,” I said, nodding. “If I’d actually hit him, it would’ve been battery.”

A few feet away, on the other side of the bar, my friend Danny snorted down at his smartphone. I turned toward him, my eyes narrowing. Any other bartender coming on shift would’ve been dutifully restocking bottles and prepping the bar for service. But not Danny, a man who’d made it his mission to minimize the effort he made on anyone else’s behalf. I once asked him if he’d ever heard of The Fountainhead, and he said he’d never pick up a book so many other people wanted him to read.

“Don’t act like you’re above this,” I told him. “You love it when I kick people out.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Means I don’t have to serve ’em.”

My boss’s eyes moved between us. “Exactly how many customers have you two been driving away?”

Danny and I exchanged a look.

“That depends,” I said slowly. “How many would you say is too many?”

My boss pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes closing briefly. “I should’ve burned this place down when I had the chance.”

Poor Mr. Tansuwan. Terminally dependable and perpetually aggrieved, he was practical to a fault—­mostly his own. As a child, he’d probably dreamed of a respectable career as a compliance officer or claims adjuster, something with regular hours and a sensible dress code. Instead, he got stuck running his estranged brother’s bikini bar. By all accounts, he hated the place, but he just couldn’t bear to turn his back on a recession-­proof revenue stream with reliable year-­over-year growth.

He opened his eyes and straightened, wincing, rubbing his lower back. “Okay,” he said, wearily, “I’ll hear you out. Tell me who this person is and why you want to get rid of him.”

“He’s right over there.” I pointed toward the small stage, a shallow dais with three spotlit poles where the dancers worked in bikinis and heels. “The man at the two-­top, on the right. In the yellow sneakers.”

My boss adjusted his bifocals and frowned. “What’s the problem? He looks like every other guy here.”

“Harsh,” Danny said under his breath.

But not wrong, I thought as I followed my boss’s gaze. In most respects the man was unremarkable, just another shaggy head of hair in a sea of skater-­boy business casual. White, late thirties, the suggestion of a beard. Distressed jeans and a hundred-­dollar tee. A crossbody bag glued to his chest. A gold pinky ring. Virtually indistinguishable from any of the other smirking, Hollywood-­adjacent dirtbags who came by, the kind of guys who called themselves connected because their condo had a view of the Warner Bros. lot.

What set this man apart wasn’t the way he looked, it was the company he kept. That night, his date was a pretty brunette in blue. She was a little older than the women he usually brought in—­thirty-­four or thirty-­five, probably—­with bouncy, blown-­out hair and perfectly blended eye shadow. He’d draped his arm across her shoulders, idly tracing the line of her collarbone with his thumb.

Up on stage, Serena was gamely gyrating to an early aughts emo anthem, but I barely noticed, too busy eyeing the brunette’s brittle, Sisyphean grin. It was a smile I saw a lot in L.A. The grim optimism of a woman who knew the score but swiped right anyway.

My hand rubbed absently at my chest. In my line of work, there are few things as inauspicious as a plucky gal determined to make the best of a bad situation. As I watched, the man lifted his hand from his date’s shoulder, flexed his fingers, then reached out and knocked his ring against the edge of the stage. Three sharp raps. Like a farm bell at feed time.

Serena’s head swung around at the sound, her lip curling a little as she took in the scene. Serena was one of my favorite dancers. She liked to wear pink ruffled bottoms and gingham triangle tops, and anyone who tried to get fresh with her could expect to walk away with at least one black eye. The man didn’t catch Serena’s contemptuous expression, however, too busy peeling bills from a money clip and pressing them into his date’s hand.

When his date hesitated instead of handing the money over, he pulled her close and murmured something that had her drawing back sharply, the back of her neck flushing red. But after a moment, she nodded and turned to give Serena the bills. Even from a distance, I could see the way she chewed at her lower lip, like she was handing over a rare hantavirus instead of a fistful of fives.

Serena looked down, heaved a sigh, and hooked her knee around the pole before mustering up a halfhearted spin. On her third time around, she snagged the money from the woman’s fingers, thanking them both with a smile that barely reached her mouth, much less her eyes.

The man settled back into his chair with a satisfied expression, his hands steepled in front of his chin.

I took a breath and tried to find the right words to describe to my boss everything I was seeing. I knew what my experience suggested and what my gut insisted, but there was no easy way to explain it to someone who didn’t have a lifelong working relationship with dread.

“The guy sucks” is what I ultimately went with.

“He sucks,” my boss repeated, his voice flat. “That’s your professional assessment.”

“I can use a ten-­dollar word if you’d like, but I’d still be saying the same thing.”

He folded his arms. “Humor an old man and explain it to me. Simply—­like I’m an even older man.”

“Well,” I began, “I’ve never seen him with the same woman twice, but it’s the same routine every time: He picks the table right up against the stage. He pulls her close. He buys her drinks. He makes her tip the dancers.”

My boss shrugged. “An unconventional approach, maybe, but I don’t see what the problem is.”

“The problem,” I said, “is that none of these women want to be here.”

Danny cleared his throat. “Strictly speaking, you could say that about most of the people in this room.”