Present

The novel opens with Detective Sanford interviewing Jenny about her clientele. Three years ago, an elite group of women began patronizing her salon, Glow Beauty Bar, and Jenny turned it into an elite, members-only establishment. She knows these customers intimately. They spend hours at Glow each week, talking freely. When asked whether the murder surprised her, Jenny responds that while each woman is kind individually, as a group they become “downright toxic.” Far from being surprised, she claims to have been expecting something like this to occur, telling the detective, “It was just a matter of time” (1).

Three weeks before the murder

Olivia Petrov visits the salon for a hair appointment before her husband Dean returns home that evening. As they chat, she compliments Jenny on her skill as a stylist, but her compliments come with hidden insults, a mode of discourse Jenny has privately termed “kinsults,” a portmanteau of “kind words” and “insults.” Olivia was Jenny’s first high-society client and recommended the salon to her circle of friends.

Olivia says that she no longer associates with her old friend, Shannon Madison, whose husband left her for a younger woman.