The Final Curtain

Having just won a prestigious MacKinlay Award for his first novel, Jonathan Stitch relays how he came to ghost-write the memoirs of beloved British game show host JJ Curtis, who worked hard to emerge from a humble background and achieve celebrity status, albeit in what most consider the most lowbrow end of popular culture. Jonathan realizes that he is not the most obvious choice of a writer for this project, and he didn't initially want the job, but he ends up viewing it as a challenge to make it stand out from all the other minor-celebrity memoirs, especially as reading about JJ would only appeal to a niche segment of the primarily British population--one that probably doesn't buy many books. Part of JJ's reason for wanting the book written is to increase his profile in order to sell his show to the lucrative US market. Despite being in the twilight of his career, JJ is denying something about his life that would make the sale of the show to a US distributor a moot point. But the biggest issue for JJ, and by association Jonathan, in these two combined projects succeeding is 27-year-old Dave Turner, a fellow British game-show host. Dave and his show are hipper, edgier, and more vulgar, in addition to Dave being younger and sexier, and is thus the front runner for the Britain-to-US game-show transplant. JJ gave Dave his first big break five years ago, but today there's no love lost between them. Each does anything to not only better the other but to also ruin the other at whatever cost, caring little about collateral damage. Jonathan must wade through the rhetoric on both sides for the truth, somewhat caught in the situation by a momentary encounter he has with someone he will learn is a physician named Dr. Colworth.