by Josh Silver
First published 2026
Mallory Maddox stares at another blank page. Seven years have passed since her last literary success, and her career teeters on the edge of irrelevance. She needs a story that will resurrect her reputation, something raw and urgent that readers crave. Then she discovers Leo, a young gay man surviving on the streets. He trades his body for money and sleeps beneath highway overpasses, battling addiction while navigating a world that discards people like him. Leo becomes Mallory's obsession. She sees his pain as her salvation, his tragedy as her ticket back to bestseller lists. She convinces herself that she deserves to craft his narrative, that his experiences belong to her simply because she can write them down. But appropriating someone's suffering comes with consequences. As Mallory pushes deeper into Leo's world, secrets begin surfacing that threaten more than her literary ambitions. She must choose between her desperate hunger for success and the human cost of her exploitation.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction, social-issues, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, gritty, intimate, introspective, morally-complex, thought-provoking
Tropes: moral-reckoning, obsession, power-imbalance, unreliable-narrator
Period: contemporary
384 pages · Paperback · Crooked Lane Books
Content warnings: addiction, substance-abuse