NIGHT OWL

A secretive author meets a young woman online, leading to an affair that turns destructive.

Matt Sky—who has a secret life as the best-selling but pseudonymous author M. Pierce—inexplicably begins exchanging manuscript pages with Hannah, a fledgling writer he met online and finds attractive. He pursues her in person, and the two begin a highly erotic affair. Matt has a girlfriend who's traveling internationally, so after a couple of weeks of hot sex with Hannah, and an increasingly tender—or possibly co-dependent—attachment, he calls the girlfriend and breaks up with her via cellphone. Girlfriend gets really mad and outs Matt as M. Pierce, which creates a shock wave across the world. Hannah can’t believe Matt didn’t tell her and won’t talk to him. Ever. Again. Except once he goes into a downward spiral, she realizes she is the cause. So of course she must help him through it. M. Pierce (yes, that’s the name of the actual author as well as the main character) has penned a well-written if melodramatic erotic novel. While the storyline seems compelling on the surface, a few questions come to mind: Why is a best-selling author exchanging pages with a young, unknown writer? Why, after a few weeks of a relationship, would a woman feel entitled to know her lover's deeply hidden secret identity? Why would that woman—who felt like he was the most amazing thing that ever happened to her—feel so outraged by his "betrayal" that she’d cut him off completely? Especially when she knows he’s a recovering alcoholic and then, reading his biography after he’s been outed, learns he survived a suicide attempt? The first third of the book is promising, but once M. Pierce is outed, what is presented as drama is more like seventh-grade immaturity.

Erotically charged, but the characters are immature and annoying.