First published 1995
Toby Temple can fill any arena and bed any woman he wants. He is the funniest man alive, and Hollywood knows it. But the spotlight does not reach everywhere, and in the quiet between shows, Toby is alone in a way that fame cannot fix. Jill Castle arrives in Los Angeles with a past she keeps buried and an appetite for success that matches his watt for watt. She is beautiful, calculating, and moving fast. When Toby and Jill find each other, they become the kind of couple that cameras chase and columnists worship. Together they sit at the top of the entertainment world. But two people this driven, this guarded, and this hungry do not simply build a life together. They negotiate one. Sidney Sheldon pulls the reader into the machinery of stardom, where every smile is a performance and every relationship carries a price. The emotional core of the novel is the gap between who these two people appear to be and who they actually are when nobody is watching.
Genres: fiction, drama, contemporary, adult, adult-fiction, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, emotionally-complex, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: dark-romance, enemies-to-lovers, secrets-and-lies, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Los Angeles, Hollywood
352 pages · Paperback · Fontana Press
Content warnings: emotional-abuse, toxic-relationship