From USA Today-bestselling Jillian Cantor, THE FICTION WRITER follows a mid-list writer hired by a handsome billionaire to write about his family history with Daphne du Maurier and finds herself drawn into a tangled web of obsession, marital secrets, and stolen manuscripts.
Last night I dreamt I went to Malibu again…
The once-rising literary star Olivia Fitzgerald is down on her luck. Her most recent novel–a re-telling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca–was a flop, her boyfriend of nine years just dumped her, and she’s battling a bad case of writer’s block. So when her agent calls her with a high-paying ghostwriting opportunity, Olivia is all too willing to sign the NDA.
At first, the write-for-hire job seems too good to be true. All she has to do is interview Henry “Ash” Asherwood, a reclusive mega billionaire, twice-named People’s Sexiest Man Alive, who wants her help in writing a book that reveals a shocking secret about his late grandmother and Daphne du Maurier. But when Olivia arrives at his Malibu estate, nothing is as it seems. Ash is hesitant to reveal any family secrets, and he seems more interested in her than their writing project. The more Olivia digs into his grandmother’s past, the more questions she has—and before she knows it, she’s trapped in a gothic mystery of her own.
With as many twists and turns as the California coast, The Fiction Writer is a captivating story exploring the boundaries of creative freedom and whose stories we have the right to tell.
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The synopsis itself was intriguing enough that I wanted to pick this one up, though I feel like I need to read Rebecca at some point because I’m sure there were tons of call backs to the original work that I would have seen had I read it. I did feel that the pacing itself on this story was a little slower than I like, I can appreciate a well crafted slow build, but this was a little too slow to keep me constantly engaged. It didn’t make me want to stop reading because I certainly wanted to know what happened, but I did find myself putting it down a few times. Still there were a number of things that kept me guessing and overall it was a well fleshed out story.
Jillian Cantor is the USA Today and internationally bestselling author of eleven novels for teens and adults, which have been chosen for LibraryReads, Indie Next, Amazon Best of the Month, and have been translated into 13 languages. She has a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Born and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, Cantor currently lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.
SOCIAL LINKS | Author website | Instagram | FB | Twitter | Goodreads
Happy reading!