25 Great Books for Summer 2024

During a pivotal scene of “Very Bad Company,” a new satirical novel involving a tech billionaire, a dead body and many bruised egos, a startup’s executives dine at Carbone in Miami, where they receive important news calligraphed inside folded origami animals that cost $5,000 each.

I half-expected to find one waiting for me as I sat down to lunch with Emma Rosenblum, the book’s author, at Carbone in New York’s Greenwich Village, the restaurant company’s original temple of tagliatelle. “Sorry, no paper cranes today,” she said.

Rosenblum, the chief content officer of Bustle Digital Media and bestselling author of last summer’s “Bad Summer People,” based the shenanigans in “Very Bad Company” off her own experience among the digerati and a copious amount of research into the many Elizabeth Holmeses and Sam Bankman-Frieds of the past few years. “When you start to read those stories about fraudulent startups, they use the same language to describe the CEOs—how they’re worshiped, how they blow everything out of proportion,” she said, pinning carpaccio to her fork. “And then it was just so easy to make up the characters based on the stories.”