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8 novels about billionaires, secret societies, and the ultra-rich behaving badly

The past few years have produced a surge of novels obsessed with the billionaire class, elite inner circles, and the terrifying ways extreme wealth reshapes morality. These books explore secret societies, inherited influence, cult-like organizations, and wealthy people so insulated from ordinary life that empathy itself begins to erode. Some focus on billionaires chasing immortality. Others examine the emptiness that comes from having unlimited access to pleasure, luxury, and power. Together, they tap into a growing cultural anxiety about what happens when the ultra-rich begin viewing the rest of society as something to manipulate, consume, or control.

If you love dark academia, literary thrillers, cult fiction, and stories about elite power structures operating behind closed doors, these recent novels belong on your reading list.

Salomé by Leslie Baird

Salomé explores what happens when the billionaire class becomes so detached from ordinary humanity that other people begin to look disposable. At the center of the novel is a secretive global network of ultra-wealthy elites connected by technology, power, and a shared obsession with transcending death itself.

These billionaires aren’t satisfied with controlling industries or governments—they want immortality so they may maintain that control forever, even if it means inhabiting the bodies of other people to achieve it. The novel turns extreme wealth into something genuinely monstrous, examining how unchecked privilege erodes empathy until human beings become little more than interchangeable commodities to be used, consumed, and discarded. Read now!

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Author Interview

Interview: Leslie Baird on Salomé, literary suspense, and the allure of charisma

Leslie Baird’s debut novel Salomé is a hypnotic blend of literary suspense, psychological intrigue, and gothic atmosphere, following a young American woman who becomes entangled in the orbit of a charismatic French family and the enigmatic woman at its center. When I reviewed the novel, I was struck by its dreamlike sense of place, its exploration of longing and vulnerability, and its willingness to venture into stranger, more unsettling territory than readers might expect. In this interview, Baird discusses the cult-like power of charisma, the French landscapes that inspired the novel, the emotional foundations beneath its mystery, and why she is drawn to stories that take risks and embrace the unexpected.

Author Leslie Baird discusses the inspirations behind her debut novel Salomé, including cult charisma, the allure of France, and her fascination with the ways people become vulnerable to mystery and belonging.

Q: Courtney is drawn into Salomé’s world almost immediately. Were you interested in exploring why intelligent, perceptive people can still be captivated by charisma and mystery?
A: I’m fascinated by cults. Not only organized groups, but how even something as ubiquitous as marketing copy can leak over into cultiness. (Shout out to Cultish: the Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell.) How quick we are to align with something, as humans seeking a safe group. And there are so many levels to this, which is fun to tease out in writing. Courtney may be able to scoff at a person who subscribes to Marco’s vitamin MLM subscription, but wasn’t she just as naive when a pretty French woman paid attention to her?

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