The Lady Waiting

There’s something devilishly enchanting about rich people doing bad things in beautiful settings. Maybe it’s because we are living our darkest fantasies vicariously through them, or maybe it’s just because we love to hate it. Whatever it is, I know that I adored every sultry page of The Lady Waiting.

Viva is a recent immigrant from Poland and our conduit into the lives of the rich and misbehaving. We meet her after she picks up a well-to-do hitchhiker in LA. Said hitchhiker is Bobby: a fellow Eastern European and art gallerist who quickly decides to take Viva under her wing. She hires Viva as a personal assistant to her and her filmmaker husband. Viva falls into life with Bobby and her husband easily, finding the line between professional and personal to be blurred. Soon, Viva’s days spent lounging by the pool and cooking meals for her employers turn into full-blown art heist scheming, falling ever deeper into the lustful and gluttonous lifestyle of her employers. Viva may start as a naive immigrant, but as she learns the ropes of this chaotic world, she learns to play the game better than anyone.

Magdalena Zyzak’s sophomore novel is full of lush descriptions and sharp writing. Viva and Bobby’s relationship, one of kinship and stark class differences, is especially compelling. The Lady Waiting is a book that will seduce you.

One bright Los Angeles day, a young Polish émigré named Viva is driving along the freeway when she’s flagged down by a dazzling, disheveled woman in green chiffon. The woman is Bobby Sleeper, a fellow Eastern European and an erstwhile art gallerist with a mysterious background and even more mysterious filmmaker husband. Within days the couple hire Viva as their assistant, then enlist her as an accomplice in an improbable scheme involving a long-lost Vermeer masterwork, a multi-million-dollar reward, and several shadowy ex-husbands.

As Bobby and her husband weave her ever more tightly into their web, Viva is swept up in an escapade that’s one part art heist, one part love triangle, and one part education of a felon. Entranced by their lifestyle, alarmed by their ramshackle scam, Viva realizes she’s out of her depth—and that only luck, cunning, and her own hustler’s instinct can save her from disaster. Careening from the canyons of LA to the canals of Venice, The Lady Waiting is a page-turning caper, a cavalcade of twenty-first-century sins—rapacious capitalism, shameless fraud, and atrocious behavior—and a showcase for three of the biggest and most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.