The Fiction Writer
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A gripping tale of romance, intrigue and deadly secrets – for fans of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Colleen Hoover’s Verity and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
Last night I dreamt I went to Malibu again...
Once-rising literary star Olivia Fitzgerald is in a downward spiral. After her second novel, a retelling of Rebecca, fails, her third novel can’t find a publisher. And Olivia's boyfriend breaking up with her hasn’t helped her creativity much either. Broke, newly single and struggling to write another book, she jumps at the chance for a high-paying ghostwriting job when her agent calls with the opportunity.
It almost seems too good to be true: all she has to do is spend a few weeks in Malibu interviewing Henry ‘Ash’ Asherwood, a recently widowed billionaire recluse, who wants her to write a book about a stunning family secret involving his grandmother and Daphne du Maurier.
But when she arrives at his Malibu estate, nothing is what it seems. For one thing, Ash is strangely reluctant to truly share his family secrets with Olivia, and she keeps catching him in lies. For another, he seems more interested in her than their writing project. (Though is that really such a bad thing?) And when she discovers a more recent secret, Olivia finds herself caught up in a gothic mystery of her own.
Can she rewrite the past to reveal the deadly truth?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This muddled suspense outing from Cantor (Half Life) opens strong before becoming mired in its metatextual references to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Struggling novelist Olivia Fitzgerald is hired to ghostwrite a novel for "reclusive mega-billionaire" Henry Asherwood, whose wife died in a tragic (and suspicious) accident a year earlier. Asherwood hires Olivia based on her most recent novel, Becky, a rework of Rebecca, telling her that du Maurier "stole his grandmother's story" and that he wants Olivia to write a novel inspired by a more direct and honest account of the late woman's life. The more she works on the project, the stranger Asherwood begins to act, stoking Olivia's suspicions about the fate of his late wife and, eventually, her own safety. Thus, Olivia "step inside my own personal retelling of Rebecca" while writing about the original book's development. Though Cantor is a strong stylist, her ultra-meta conceit quickly becomes too complicated, stalling narrative momentum with extended passages from Olivia's in-progress novel and sacrificing suspense for cleverness one too many times. This ambitious gothic experiment misses the mark.
