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The Heirs — A Murder Mystery About the Price of Perfection · The Book Brief Project

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: A small hand closes around a chess piece. There are
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: other objects on the table, a paintbrush and a fencing
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: foil among them. The child reaching across them has no
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: idea she is signing anything, because she is a toddler
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: and the piece is within reach. At the end of
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the table sits the man who arranged it. His name
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: is Leontas Button, a French-born billionaire who made his fortune
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: selling games, and in Farida, Abike Iimide's novel The Hairs,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: he has adopted five toddlers from orphanages around the world
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: to prove a single sentence. Genius is made, not born.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: The girl is Fola. Sixteen years later, she is a
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  Speaker 1: chess grandmaster with a doctorate, and the newspapers call her
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: the brain. Nobody has ever asked her what she would
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: have reached for on a different afternoon. The billionaire's secretary
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: watches the ceremony and recognizes it. In China, there is
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: a first birthday custom called Zhua Zhu. A baby is
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: set in front of a spread of objects, and whatever
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: it grabs is read, half as a game and half
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: as a blessing, as a hint of the life ahead.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: He is watching the custom with the game taken out.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: In the Button House, a guess about the future becomes
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  Speaker 1: the future itself. a contract signed with a fist. The
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: novel is sold as a murder mystery, and it is one.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: The billionaire is killed during his own party, aboard his
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: own yacht, at 11.44 at night. But under the alibis
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: and the suspects, the book keeps circling a stranger question.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: What did that table actually produce? Leontes Button was certain
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: he knew. By its last pages, the novel has a
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: different answer and it is a much colder one. A
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: warning before going further. This episode gives away the ending,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: including who killed him, because the ending is where the
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: argument lives. If you want the twists fresh, this is
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: the moment to stop and come back later. Abike Imide
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: grew up in South London, and she broke through in
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: 2021 with Ace of Spades, a thriller about two black
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: students at an elite private school being hunted by an
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: anonymous texter. The trick of that book was that the
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: villain turned out to be larger than any one person.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: The school itself was the machine. She writes genre fiction
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: the way an engineer builds a delivery system. The suspense
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: is real, and it is always carrying something heavier underneath it.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: The heirs came out in June of this year. went
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  Speaker 1: straight onto the bestseller lists, and arrived wrapped in the
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: usual comparisons. A family of rich teenagers, a locked mansion,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: a dead patriarch, a will. All of that is accurate,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: and all of it is packaging. The press has a
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: label for each of the five heirs. Fola is the brain. Octavius,
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: the pianist, is the maestro. The eldest brother, who won
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Olympic gold in fencing while still a teenager, is the Olympian. Perdita,
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  Speaker 1: the youngest, is the artist. And Romeo, who writes, and
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: whose talent never turned into the kind of fame the
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  Speaker 1: experiment required, is called the failure, in print, by journalists,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: for years. The novel opens on the day of the
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: 10th annual Prodigy Ball, the father's yearly celebration of his
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: own results. And the first thing it shows you is
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: that every result is cracking. The fencer limps in on
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  Speaker 1: a cast with an injury that may end his career.
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  Speaker 1: And his sister's face suggests it was no accident. Perdita
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  Speaker 1: painted the work that made her famous more than two
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  Speaker 1: years ago and has not finished a painting since. Octavius
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: has not set foot in the house in three years.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Fola finds him playing piano for strangers at Grand Central Station. Anonymous,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: which seems to be the only way he can still
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  Speaker 1: enjoy it. Later, she tries to talk to her father
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: about a decision about her own career, and he dismisses
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: her before she can make the case. At the press conference,
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  Speaker 1: there is a table for the prodigies. There is no
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: chair for Romeo. That evening, the family boards a yacht
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: called Titania, and at some point in the celebrations, the
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  Speaker 1: father offers the room a piece of advice. You must
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: accept failure. he tells them. He means it as wisdom
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  Speaker 1: from a man who has never had to. By morning,
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  Speaker 1: he is dead. The investigation that follows is run by
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  Speaker 1: a police chief who happens to be an old friend
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  Speaker 1: of the family. Phones are confiscated. Everyone who was at
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  Speaker 1: the ball becomes a suspect. The will is read, with
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  Speaker 1: every asset frozen until someone is arrested, and it is
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: one last report card. Perdita inherits the company and the house.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: along with roughly $ 1. 5 billion. The two sons who left
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  Speaker 1: home received the smallest shares, docked for leaving. Even dead,
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  Speaker 1: the father is still grading them. Then the book opens
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: a door into the past. Three years earlier, the son
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  Speaker 1: of the family's chef died in a car crash that
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: was written up as drunk driving. He was not alone
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  Speaker 1: in the car. Octavius and the fencer were with him.
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  Speaker 1: After the crash, A team on the button payroll arrived
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  Speaker 1: and erased the two brothers from the scene as if
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  Speaker 1: they had never been there. The chef's family received money
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: every year afterward. Nobody called it silence. Nobody needed to.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: And later the novel reveals that the same team did
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  Speaker 1: the same work in Italy, scrubbing the chef's daughter from
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  Speaker 1: the scene of another crash, the one that killed the
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: girl she loved. This is the moment the book shows
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: its real subject. The button method has two halves. The
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  Speaker 1: first half is the one on the posters, the drills,
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  Speaker 1: the isolation, the schedule, the table of objects. The second
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  Speaker 1: half never appears at a press conference. It is the
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: crew that arrives after something goes wrong and arranges the
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  Speaker 1: world so that it didn't. In this house, prodigies are manufactured,
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  Speaker 1: and so is innocence. There is a real version of
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  Speaker 1: this experiment, and it is worth holding next to the fiction.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: In the late 1960s, a Hungarian psychologist named Laszlo Polgar
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  Speaker 1: courted his future wife partly through letters laying out a plan.
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  Speaker 1: They would raise children who proved that geniuses are made.
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  Speaker 1: They chose chess, because in chess, the results can't be
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  Speaker 1: argued with. In 1991, the youngest of their three daughters
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  Speaker 1: became a grandmaster at 15, the youngest anyone had ever been.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: and she is widely considered the strongest woman ever to
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  Speaker 1: play the game. As adults, the sisters have generally spoken
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: about that childhood with more gratitude than anger. What the
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  Speaker 1: Polgar story doesn't have is a cleanup crew. That experiment
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  Speaker 1: ran in a Budapest apartment under the family's own name,
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  Speaker 1: and a daughter who didn't take to the board would
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  Speaker 1: have been a disappointment, never a liability. The heirs imagines
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  Speaker 1: the version where the experiment is a brand worth billions,
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  Speaker 1: and a brand cannot afford a dead boy in a
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  Speaker 1: wrecked car. That is why the nature and nurture debate
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: in this book feels like bait. It isn't really an
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  Speaker 1: argument with Polgar. It's a study of what an experiment
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  Speaker 1: has to hide once it starts making money. So by
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: now the novel has stripped the five heirs of their
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: labels and shown you the machinery that kept those labels clean.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: What it hasn't told you yet is what the man
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: running the experiment actually believed. Under pressure from her siblings,
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Perdita gives up the secret she has been carrying since
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: the night of the ball. She was never adopted. She
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: is Leontes Button's biological daughter. He arranged her birth through
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: in vitro fertilization with a young Vietnamese refugee and controlled
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: every part of the pregnancy. The woman died giving birth.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: He wanted to know whether genius could be inherited. On
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  Speaker 1: the yacht, hours before he died, Perdita confronted him, and
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: he showed no remorse at all. He told her she
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  Speaker 1: was his true heir. Sit with what that means. The
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: man who built his public life on the claim that
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  Speaker 1: genius is made was running a second experiment on the side,
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  Speaker 1: a control group of one testing the opposite theory. He
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: did not trust his own hypothesis. He hedged it with blood,
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  Speaker 1: and he hid the confession in plain sight. In Shakespeare's
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: The Winter's Tale, a king named Leontes refuses to acknowledge
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: his infant daughter and has her sent away. And her name, Perdita,
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  Speaker 1: means the lost one. A man who named his yacht
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  Speaker 1: after a Shakespeare fairy queen did not choose his daughter's
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  Speaker 1: name by accident. He left the answer in the one
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  Speaker 1: place nobody would think to read it. Which brings us
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  Speaker 1: to the father's private office on the yacht. a room
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  Speaker 1: he called Olympus. Shortly before he died, he had told
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  Speaker 1: his secretary that he had stage four bone cancer. Then
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: he asked Octavius to give him a lethal dose of morphine.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: When the boy hesitated, the father reached for leverage years before.
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  Speaker 1: To show off his mechanical skill, Octavius had taken apart
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: the brakes of a car in the garage at the house.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: He had no idea that car would later be given
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  Speaker 1: to the chef's son. His father knew. He had held
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  Speaker 1: on to that fact for three years. the way a
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  Speaker 1: player keeps a piece in reserve. Octavius refused, and then
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  Speaker 1: he did something the experiment never planned for. He texted
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  Speaker 1: his brothers and sisters in a code they had invented
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: as small children, hiding together in the attic of the house,
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  Speaker 1: away from the schedule. All five came. The father started
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  Speaker 1: berating them, and when he moved to strike Octavius, Romeo
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  Speaker 1: pushed him. Leontes' button fell backward onto a mounted rhinoceros head,
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  Speaker 1: and the horn went into his neck. The father who
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  Speaker 1: told a crowd to accept failure was killed by the
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  Speaker 1: son the newspapers called the failure. It is an almost
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  Speaker 1: unbearably neat irony, and the book earns it because the
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: push isn't planned. It is the one thing in the
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  Speaker 1: whole button house that happens without training. What happens next
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  Speaker 1: is the part I can't stop thinking about. Fola takes over. Calmly,
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  Speaker 1: the way she might play out a lost position, she
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  Speaker 1: assigns alibis and decides which evidence disappears. The secretary finds
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  Speaker 1: footage from cameras hidden inside the stuffed animal heads on
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  Speaker 1: the yacht. He destroys it and confesses to the murder
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  Speaker 1: himself to protect the children he watched grow up. Soon after,
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  Speaker 1: the news reports that he has died in prison And
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: in the final pages, the chef's daughter tracks him down
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  Speaker 1: in Shanghai, alive, living with his mother. The heirs had
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  Speaker 1: used their inheritance to bribe prison officials into faking his death,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: then flew him out on a private jet. Count the cover-ups.
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  Speaker 1: A car crash erased from the record. A second crash,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: in Italy, erased the same way. And then a death
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  Speaker 1: on a yacht. A network of alibis. A false confession.
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  Speaker 1: and a death certificate that was bought and paid for.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Three times the button machinery makes something disappear, and the
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  Speaker 1: third time the people running it are the children. They're
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: good at it. They are, it turns out, every bit
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: as good at it as their father was. The novel
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  Speaker 1: wants you to read its ending as liberation, and part
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: of me does. The cover-up is an act of love.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: The secretary's confession is the most generous thing anyone does
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: in the book. Perdita refuses the will as written and
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  Speaker 1: shares the house among all five. She gives much of
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: her fortune to charities for exploited women and for refugees,
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: which is a direct reply to the way she was born.
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  Speaker 1: These are people choosing each other over a man who
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: never once chose them. And yet, the prison officials were paid.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: The death was manufactured. The machine, the book spends 300
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: pages condemning is still running. And the only thing that
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: has changed is who sits at the controls. Reviewers have
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: pointed to the pacing, which really does lurch, and to
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: the late cascade of revelations, which really does pile up.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: I would put the problem somewhere else. The novel sees
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: its own pattern with complete clarity when the father runs it.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: When the children run it, the novel looks away. Maybe
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: the looking away is deliberate. Maybe Abike Imide knows exactly
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: what her heirs inherited, along with the money, and leaves
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  Speaker 1: it unsaid for the reader to find, the way Leontes
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: left his secret inside a borrowed name. I can't tell.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: I like the ending, and I don't trust it, and
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: I don't think those two feelings cancel each other out.
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  Speaker 1: So here is what that table produced. Leontes Button believed
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: he was making a pianist, a fencer, a painter, and
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  Speaker 1: a grandmaster. What he made were five people who know
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: how to make a death disappear and who did it
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: when the moment came for one another instead of for him.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: Whether that is the experiment failing or the experiment succeeding
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: is a question the book leaves on the table next
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: to the chess piece. If you like a book read
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: slowly and then argued with, follow the book brief project.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Another one is already open on the desk waiting its turn.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: A year later The five of them play their first
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: gig as a band. They call themselves The Buttons, which
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: is their father's name finally attached to something he never planned.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: It was a dream they had in the attic, long
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: before anyone handed them an object and a future. They
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: are terrible. Nobody assigned their instrument. and nobody is grating.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Somewhere in Shanghai, a man the world believes is dead
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: is living quietly with his mother. On a small stage,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: five pairs of hands hold things they chose for themselves
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: and play them badly. None of them has ever been happier.