Windfall

Staub (The Other Family) underwhelms in this standalone thriller centered on the fallout from a shared lottery jackpot. Leila, J.J., and Molly, who met as freshmen at Northwestern University and bonded when they learned they all had September birthdays, have all chipped in for a winning billion-dollar lottery ticket. Its spoils offer a new start for the trio, whose post-college lives have fallen short of their aspirations. The friends hire Shea Daniels, a sudden-wealth consultant (whose business is called Windfall), to advise them. Daniels invites them to her home (also called Windfall), the former estate of a two-time Oscar nominee who vanished two decades earlier in a disappearance deemed “Hollywood’s most intriguing mystery.” Unsurprisingly, the September Girls’ stay at Windfall proves hazardous, and the friends fear that one of them may be trying to claim the billion dollars for herself. Genre veterans won’t find much surprising here, and cliché-ridden prose (“She ignores him, heading into the house, lugging other people’s secrets like an iron chain shackling her to the past”) doesn’t help. Staub aims for a jackpot, but winds up losing the house. (July)