On a balmy evening in late March, an oligarch's wife hosts a party on a superyacht moored in the Maldives.

Tables cover the massive deck, adorned with orchids, champagne bottles, name cards of celebrities. This is what Kata has wanted for a long time: acceptance into the glittering world of high society. But there are those who aim to come between Kata and her goal, and they are closer to home than she could have imagined.

Witness to the corruption and violence underneath the shiny surfaces is Mel, a young English woman employed to tutor Kata's precocious daughter and navigate her through the class codes of English privilege. Now the closest Mel gets to such privilege is as hired help to the wealthy, and she is deeply resentful. Exquisitely written and deliciously unreliable, Queen K takes the reader to some of the most luxurious places in the world.

But a dark refrain sounds from the very beginning of the story and grows towards its operatic finale: a novel about insatiable material desire can only ever be a tragedy.