The Five-Star Fake

About the book

I invented a boyfriend named Julian to survive my sister's wedding. Then the caterer landed in a holding cell, and the replacement chef turned out to be the one man in the state whose duck confit I compared to an old boot—in print, under a pen name, in the review that cost him a Michelin star. The health inspector cannot save me now.

Margot Ellery is the anonymous senior critic behind "M. E. Reader," three months from the Editor-in-Chief chair and ninety minutes from social execution: forty-two wedding guests are en route to the Grand Pine Lodge, her mother wants the fictional green-energy boyfriend by the stone fireplace at noon, and Aunt Evelyn's podiatrist is circling.

Beckett Hale took over the wedding contract at four a.m. as collateral on a forty-grand smoker. He has a knife roll, a Cornell business degree, a scar on his lower lip, and a very specific grudge against the critic currently standing in his prep space in dusty-rose chiffon asking him to wear a suit.

The deal: four days as her devoted boyfriend in exchange for a three-page comeback feature in the December issue. His rules—the kitchen comes first and she never gives Chef Hale notes on the sauce; no touchy-feely anything unless the cover story demands it; and nobody, ever, says the word "duck."

Then comes the one-bed arithmetic, a habanero argument that ends in a thirty-seven-degree walk-in, a rescue on Hemlock Ridge—and the discovery of what Beckett has been carrying in that knife roll for a year. Every rule at this wedding is about to break. Starting with hers.