Author Paul Giverney is between publishers. Despite stratospheric sales of his books and frenzied competition to sign him up, he lives modestly in New York's East Village and nurses a secret ambition of a very different sort. In fact, he has a byzantine plan for accomplishing it: the number-one condition of his proposed contract with the literary giant Mackenzie-Haack. They must drop a brilliant but far less successful author and assign his equally gifted editor to Paul. In the hornets' next of preening egos and cutthroat career moves this stirs up, ambitious editor Clive Esterhaus covets the glossy megastar Paul for himself. Is the book contract unbreakable? Clive never dreams how a very different kind of contract will force him - and his ambition - into a very foul matter, indeed.