There’s a scene in Angelica Baker’s debut novel, Our Little Racket, where the underaged daughter of a fallen financial tycoon escapes her Greenwich, Connecticut community and runs off to New York City. She’s looking for a reprieve from the suffocating attention her family is under and winds up at a noisy bar. It has an underlying din dominated by male voices and interspersed with female shrieks in reaction to them. The moment is an apt metaphor for this book and its rumination on the ways in which women can become the collateral damage of scandal. In this novel, the men at the root of the story create chaos and then proceed to exist in shadows, while the women are positioned to be reactive, left to process the situation they’ve inherited and face societal scrutiny head-on. Baker’s book takes a traditionally male-dominated tale and shifts focus away from the man directly involved. It tells the story of Bob D’Amico, the CEO of an investment bank that has collapsed, as he faces allegations of malfeasance. Instead of following the intricacies of the scandal, Baker takes us through the reverberations of it through the perspective of five women in Bob’s life. Our points of continue...