Rating: 4 out of 5.

I will never get tired of reading books about messed up rich people doing messed up things. I didn’t really know what to expect with this book and it exceeded my expectations. It revolves around the Button family. The father is a crazy rich guy who adopts 5 children (heirs) and experiments on them using his “Button Method”. He’s testing whether nature or nurture will decide the future of people. The children are immediately emersed in a grinding lifestyle of non-stop training and education by the world’s top experts to train the kids to become prodigies in 5 distinct categories. He succeeds in 4 of the 5 children.

You can imagine how messed up the kids are when they’ve been trained and forced their whole lives to be perfect. They are closer to each other than you’d expect considering how they were raised, but there are still fractures in their relationships.

Mr. Button is murdered on the yacht where he is holding his annual Prodigy Ball. Everyone that attended the ball is a suspect, including the 5 heirs. As the police interview people and narrow down the suspect list, the story alternates between the current time period and the past timeline in each of the heirs lives to discover what happened in their childhood and as they grew that formed them to be who they are at present time. It’s just as heartbreaking as you can imagine, and I loved how the investigation of their father’s death actually forces secrets to come out, healing to happen, and the heirs to resume their close relationships.

The book has plenty of twists and shocking moments that will keep your interest. I listened to the book and the narrator did a great job depicting the characters. I was able to distinguish between the characters and you felt their agony, stress, pain, anger, and heartbreak as their stories come out and the mystery is solved. This book was different from what I thought it’d be, but I really enjoyed it.

I received a complimentary audiobook of this from Macmillan Audio. All opinions are my own.