THE HOLLYWOOD ASSISTANT

A would-be novelist falls into the perfect job and then keeps right on falling.

Cassidy Foster’s boyfriend may have dumped her, but all is far from lost. Before leaving to work on a film shooting in Prague, her oldest friend, Lexie, persuaded her to move from Texas to the Hollywood Hills by dangling a dream job in front of her. Running errands for Marisol Torres and Nate Sterling may not sound like a big deal, but Marisol is a hot actress, Nate is a hot director, they live in a beautiful house in Malibu, and the job pays $5,000 a month for remarkably little work. And Cassidy, who approaches her employers’ every casual remark with the enthusiasm of a puppy, is actually good at what work there is. In no time at all, she’s organized Marisol’s closets to a fare-thee-well, earning herself bonuses like “Fourteen pair of designer jeans!,” and Nate is asking her to read and comment on screenplays that have been sent to him, rewarding her with cash bonuses that are likely to double her salary. This would all be too good to be true even if Cobb didn’t keep interrupting the idyll with flash-forwards in which Cassidy, questioned by the police in connection with some long-undisclosed crime, indulges in rueful reflections like “How did I think by agreeing to do something so crazy, things would end well?” When Nate asks Cassidy to read his own unproduced screenplay for “a feminist, erotic thriller,” she thinks things have gone about as far as they can. Readers will know that they’ve barely begun.

An inverted fairy tale that goes on long enough for savvy fans to predict every single twist.