Shock jock radio producer Juliet Roland has never been able to maintain a friendship with a woman without it ending in betrayal. When her fourteen-year-old daughter Olive gets bullied, Jules brushes off her list of Top Five B*tches Who Ruined My Life, a collection of former friends who have hurt her. She figures if she can understand how those relationships turned sour, she can help Olive through her own conflict. Jules meets with each woman, confronting her past to figure out the unspoken rules of female friendships. 

As she hears the other side of the conflicts with each woman, Jules must come to terms with her roles as both victim and villain — a twist she sees play out in real time as Olive’s true role in the bullying incidents becomes clear. When her station is purchased by a competing media conglomerate and her new station manager just happens to be Bitch Number Five, the life she’s built for herself begins to crumble. To keep it together and to keep her daughter from becoming a name on another girl’s Bitch List, Jules must enlist help from the very women she’s spent a decade disparaging — even if excavating long held grudges means exposing secrets that could sabotage her relationship with Olive.

WF / Contemporary Fiction 82,000 words