The Hollywood Assistant

The Hollywood Assistant is a standalone psychological thriller by May Cobb. Cassidy Foster is adrift after a breakup when a well-connected friend lands her a job assisting Marisol and Nate Sterling, a charismatic and apparently perfect Hollywood couple. The work is light, the pay is generous, and the Sterlings' world of designer clothes, poolside afternoons and industry parties is easy to fall into.

When Nate begins asking Cassidy to read the scripts he is writing, she lets herself imagine a way into her own stalled writing career. What she is really being drawn into is the gap between how the Sterlings present themselves and what their marriage actually is, and when a death puts the household under investigation she finds herself badly placed to explain her own role in it.

Cobb writes in the vein of her earlier Texas-set suspense novels: an unreliable, wanting narrator, an atmosphere of borrowed wealth, and a plot that turns on obsession and self-deception.