Spotlight & Giveaway: A Lie for a Lie by Ren DeStefano

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Ren DeStefano’s new release: A Lie for a Lie

A deadly game of cat and mouse unfolds when a housewife with a secret life takes on a tech billionaire with secrets darker than her own . . .

Margaux leads a double life that would make most people dizzy. By day, she’s a seemingly ordinary interior decorator with a picture-perfect marriage. By night, she works for a mysterious employer known only as Mr. X. Her specialty: infiltrating the lives of dangerous targets, gaining their trust, and ultimately exposing their crimes.

Her latest assignment: unraveling the reclusive life of Bertram Casimir, a billionaire tech CEO whose career is as mysterious as his past. His sister claims he stole her app to build his fortune. Not only that, his girlfriend may or may not have recently gone missing.

Bertram sees through Margaux’s carefully constructed facade, matching her move for move. As the lines between hunter and prey blur, Margaux finds herself unexpectedly drawn to Bertram. They share more than she’d like to admit—a dangerous intelligence, a taste for high-stakes manipulation. When the evidence begins to shift, threatening to destroy everything she knows, Margaux realizes this is far more than just another job.

Her hidden past—and her life—are now on the line. One lie remains, and it might just save her.
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Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from A Lie for a Lie 

The teachers at Collette’s esteemed private school would be horrified to know that I’m exposing her to this case. But I wasn’t much older than she is when I was in a courtroom as a defendant and stood trial for murder.
I already know the verdict will be guilty. The head juror is a petite college student named Mira Hart, and she’s working for me. If there was any evidence of jury tampering that led to this conviction, the courts would have to throw the whole thing out. But that won’t be an issue.
Emma Graham sits tall and straight. Maybe she’s trying to maintain her pride, or maybe she still thinks she can get away with the crime she committed forty years ago. It happened before they had things like DNA testing, and small- town cops thought a man was more likely to take his own life than his loving wife was. This was back when the news media lined their pockets with sad stories of pigtailed girls who were stolen from their beds or snatched from their bicycles.
I found Emma’s story while browsing a thread on Reddit. “What’s a solved case that you think the cops got wrong?” Investigators never looked into Emma’s motives. Just two months after her husband was found, she cut all communication with her extended family and ran off with a man she’d been having an affair with. These could have been the actions of a desperate widow looking to escape her grief. But the case still intrigued me.
Someone on the forum claimed to have a taped confession. He was an Uber driver, and he’d recently shuttled an intoxicated Emma home from a senior center bingo night. She told the Uber driver that he shouldn’t get too cocky about his good looks, because one day he would also be washed up and ugly, like the man she’d murdered for a fifty-thousand-dollar insurance settlement.
Most people assumed the post was a hoax. No shortage of those on the internet. But I reached out and obtained a copy of his dashcam footage. I took on the case—no easy feat—and was able to piece the evidence together.
But I’m not a cop. I’m not even an investigator. I am part of an organization that handles things a bit differently.
Dear Emma, I began my letter to her. Although nothing can bring your loving husband back, today you are given the chance to redeem yourself. In your backyard, below the seashell where you keep the spare key, you’ll find a cassette tape of the night you con-
fessed to positioning your sedated husband behind the wheel of his van, putting it in drive, and watching him roll forward into the lake. Some details the police never released, to prove that I’m serious: You’d given him Benadryl in a late-night smoothie, and he threw up on impact. You had tried to tape a rock to the gas pedal, but it kept falling off, so you had to push it yourself. You tell people that your husband was planning to leave you and that’s why you were having an affair. But after the truth cocktail my contact slipped into your drink at the bar, you confessed. You don’t remember this, but I have the proof.
By signing your latest dearly departed husband’s pension checks over to the safe home for battered women and children, you can save lives like the one you ended and make things right. You will not go to prison if you comply.
I’ll contact you soon with instructions.

Excerpted from A LIE FOR A LIE by Ren DeStefano, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026
 
 

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Meet the Author:

Ren DeStefano lives in Connecticut, where she was born and raised. When she’s not writing thrillers, she’s listening to true crime podcasts and crocheting way too many blankets.