Casting Couch

When artless Cambridge academic Andrew Billingham is beguiled into playing the handsome prince in a Russian TV commercial, he and gorgeous wife Bryony decide it’s too good an opportunity to miss.

Filming in the stifling heat of a Moscow summer, however, irresistible Andrew is accosted by studio folk—men and women alike— who jostle for his sexual favors. The evident adoration of Emilia he would reciprocate, were he single; director Jonny’s advances he would find not unappealing, were he gay; although, Bryony did allow her husband carte blanche should he find himself desiring another.

Conflicted between keeping his conscience clear and his urges to cave in to the many erotic possibilities presented, it’s only when Andrew’s private anxieties take on a more public dimension that he begins to wonder whether alluring make-up artist Emilia is all she pretends to be. There is, after all, political unrest in Russia—and Emilia seems closer to it than Andrew ever expected.

The tumultuous final instalment of the Slave to Beauty series where a good man does battle with the twin demons of disloyalty and temptation.