As Douglas Kennedy's Temptation opens, David Armitage has been trying for years to break into the screenwriting game. (In a nice touch, he's working at the West Hollywood bookstore Book Soup.) Then, a production company buys his script. It's picked up as a series, and David is hired on as the executive story supervisor.
Kennedy fast-forwards through David's meteoric rise, where he abandons the marriage that had been strained by his previous failures and takes up with a hot, young network exec, then slows the story down again as David receives an invitation from a reclusive billionaire. Philip Fleck made his fortune in investing, but he's always wanted to make movies. Now he has one of David's scripts, and he wants to turn it into a 21st-century version of Pasolini's notoriously, deliberately obscene Salo.
At first glance, Temptation looks like a smart, snappy update of the Jackie Collins/Jacqueline Susann novel, with sleazy brokers who can quote Adam Smith by memory and illicit romances sparked by quotations from T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson. Poke at the glitzy surface details, though, and you'll begin to see a lean, mean noir thriller, as a gossip columnist's accusation of plagiarism snowballs into David losing his job, his girlfriend and even his Emmy. It doesn't take too long to figure out that Fleck is behind the systematic dismantling of David's life.
In some ways, including the first-person narration, David's existential crisis and the path he finds out of it echo Kennedy's debut novel, The Big Picture (1996). As Kennedy continues to tackle the theme of upended lives, Temptation demonstrates a literary confidence that lifts his stories above much of the competition. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com