The Divide
A novel
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4.5 • 10 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A failed actress turned grifting psychic searches for her missing doppelgänger and is plunged into a web of murder and corruption among Hollywood A-listers.
"Weird and wonderfully addictive—reads like Agatha Christie on acid, or maybe Raymond Chandler adapted by the Coen Brothers." —Ernest Cline, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Ready Player One
When Jenny St. John was eighteen, she moved to Los Angeles from her rural midwestern hometown and scored the lead role in an independent film called The Divide. Under the intimate direction of young auteur Serge Grumet, Jenny was on her way to becoming the next indie darling. But then the movie tanked, and Jenny never caught a second break. Now, two decades later, after floundering on the fringes of the entertainment industry, she’s barely keeping afloat running a low-level grift as a psychic life coach.
But when news surfaces that Serge has been murdered, Jenny’s life is turned upside down. Unbeknownst to Jenny, Serge’s ex-wife, painter Gena Santos, looks alarmingly similar to Jenny. So much so that when Gena goes missing, the cops think Jenny is Gena.
Jenny finds herself pulled into Gena’s world and manages to leverage both her resemblance to Gena and her faux psychic abilities to infiltrate the affluent yet unstable inner circle of friends, which include a Korean pop idol–turned–social media star and an Oscar-winning actress–turned–wellness guru. Soon Jenny’s search to find Gena unearths dark secrets about her own past while putting her squarely in the sights of a killer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An actor turned psychic stumbles into the center of an LAPD murder investigation in Richter's winningly offbeat debut. Twenty-five years ago, Jenny St. John starred in The Divide, a never-released movie directed by first-timer Serge Grumet. Despite the film's failure, Serge went on to become a major Hollywood player. In the meantime, Jenny's star faded, and she rebranded as an "intuitive counselor" who uses her talent for reading people to provide life advice. When Serge turns up dead, the prime suspect is his ex-wife, painter Genevieve Santos, who flees Los Angeles. The problem? Genevieve and Jenny look exactly alike, and authorities come to believe they're the same person. To clear her name, Jenny interviews friends, family, and associates of Serge and Genevieve, applying tricks she's learned in the psychic trade to ferret out the truth, only to unwittingly make herself a target for Serge's killer. Though the case of mistaken identity that jump-starts the plot feels far-fetched, Richter comes through with sparkling prose, a consistently surprising mystery, and an engrossing portrait of contemporary Los Angeles. Fans of Hollywood neo-noir will relish this fresh update on an old formula.
