Lucky Seed

Huang (The Emperor and the Endless Palace) channels Succession with this delectable drama of a billionaire Chinese American family and their Machiavellian matriarch’s search for an heir. Roses Sun became CEO of Sunfang Global after the death of her father, Big Boss Sun, who cofounded the construction and logging conglomerate with the powerful Fang family before screwing them over. Roses’s father stipulated in his will that the company must pass to a male descendant, but with her younger brother deemed incompetent, there’s no apparent heir. Her fortune teller claims that if her family fails to produce an heir, they’ll become “hungry ghosts” in the afterlife, prompting Roses to scheme with her gay nephew, Wayward. She makes him president and promises that if his son, if he has one, will take ownership of the company trust. The board members recoil, not only because they’re homophobic but because they loathe Wayward’s plan to transition the company to green building practices. The scheme also upsets Roses’s daughter, April, who fell out of favor with her mom after she left the company to care for her daughter. The delightfully over-the-top plot is rife with shifting alliances, manipulations, and intergenerational tensions. Readers will eat this up. Agent: Dan Milaschewski, UTA. (Nov.)