After rejecting Hugh Waters's already green-lighted screenplay, big-time Hollywood producer Hedda Chase is taken hostage by Waters. He then forces Hedda to play out the screenplay's scenario: she's put in the trunk of a car left running at the airport. Hedda is a stereotypical character: she came from nothing, went to an Ivy League school, and through hard work and tenacity is making it in Hollywood. Her vision is to do away with violent films that portray women as sex symbols. This leads us to a subplot of her producing a film about the terrible treatment of Afghani women. Screenwriter Waters is an insurance office worker with major personality problems that explode into full-out evilness by the novel's conclusion. Lastly, through a strange twist of consequences, we meet a 16-year-old runaway and her lover, a soldier who just returned from Afghanistan with his own problems. Verdict Having enjoyed Brundage's previous novels (Somebody Else's Daughter; The Doctor's Wife), this reviewer wanted to like this book because the premise was so different. While the story is well written, the characters are so unpleasant that by the end most readers will not care whether Hedda escapes. Tepidly recommended for the author's fans. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/10.]-Marianne Fitzgerald, Annapolis, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Hollywood goes Hollyweird in this intense, provocative thriller about power, war, and the portrayal of women in film from Brundage (Somebody Else's Daughter). When Hedda Chase, a producer at Gladiator Films, rejects The Adjuster, a violently sexist movie script by insurance underwriter Hugh Waters, Hugh makes a special trip from his home in New Jersey to L.A. After locating where she lives, he confronts Hedda in her driveway and demands an explanation. Unhappy with her response, he drugs and stuffs Hedda in the trunk of her vintage BMW. He drives the car to an LAX parking lot and walks away. Hugh proceeds to befriend Hedda's boyfriend, married documentary filmmaker Tom Foster, and otherwise make a new life for himself, ditching his wife and job back in Jersey while Hedda barely clings to life. Brundage brilliantly shifts back and forth between Hugh, Hedda, and Denny, an injured Iraq war veteran, who plays a key role in Hedda's fate. The action culminates in illuminating revelations about the intersection of theater with reality. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

When a production company buys Hugh Waters' film script, the insurance underwriter envisions a new life for himself as a Hollywood screenwriter. But his dreams are dashed when producer Hedda Chase drops the project, rejecting its premise: a man whose advances are rebuffed by his female coworker drugs the woman, puts her in the trunk of his car, and leaves the car to be stolen, with violent results. So Hugh replicates his script, leaving Hedda in the trunk of her own BMW at the airport; when the car is taken by Denny, an Iraq vet still suffering the aftereffects of the war, Hugh feels absolved of responsibility. Brundage changes both person and point of view in sections about Hedda, describing her innermost feelings about being a powerful female in a man's world, and about Denny and his thoughts on the war. Insightful as these character studies are, they slow the thriller's development and will appeal more to literary-fiction readers. Still, Brundage (Somebody Else's Daughter, 2008) excels at pushing her characters to their limits and then reflecting on the consequences of their behavior.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist

A high-minded female Hollywood studio executive is trapped in the kind of lurid drama she hates when she is abducted by a sociopath whose script she rejected.As the recently installed executive producer at Gladiator Films, Hedda Chase wants to rewrite the studio's trashy agenda by telling stories that "resonate in the hearts and minds of the American public" and eliminate male dominance over women. After she 86's a misogynistic thriller her predecessor greenlighted before dropping dead, she is stalked by the writer, Hugh Waters, a New Jersey insurance underwriter who was paid a large sum for his script but feels abused. Taking cues from its violent plot, he drugs her and deposits her in the trunk of her vintage BMW. When the car is stolen by a troubled young Iraq War veteran, who manages to ignore the thumping noises in the trunk as he heads to Las Vegas with a teenage runaway, Hedda has time to think about a project of hers being filmed in Abu Dhabi, about the stoning death of an Iraqi woman accused of committing adultery with an American soldier. The overlapping plots work better than they should, as does Brundage's odd use of second person when introducing Hedda's point of view. But the author's Hollywood critique is stale and her aspirations to artistic meaning are no more fruitful than Hedda's. Her bursts of high literary stylecreate the nagging sense that she is slumming in the thriller genre. Brundage (Somebody Else's Daughter, 2008, etc.) may be aware of the cheap irony of real life imitating B movies, but that doesn't make the device any less hackneyed.A psychological thriller with neither compelling insight nor thrills.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.