What Lies Around Us - Andrew Crofts

Imagine this, fellow writers: You have been paid a million dollars by a Silicon Valley billionaire to ghostwrite the autobiography of your favourite film star – who may even be your secret crush. 

As if that wasn’t good enough, every publisher in London and New York is pursuing you, begging you to put in a good word for them, offering eight figure advances.

Your employer, however, has far more money and far more marketing muscle than any mere publisher, so you don’t need any of them. You can do the whole publishing process yourself and then hand the finished product over to his marketing machine.

Too good to be true? Well, yes actually. This is just the starting point, and one of the many sub-plots, of my forthcoming novel, “What Lies Around Us”, due out from Red Door Publishing in June.

Once the ghost gets to California, of course, he discovers there is far more at stake than a mere publishing deal. Everyone he meets seems to have a hidden agenda and someone is willing to kill to ensure that their plans work out. But what are those plans, who are the ultimate puppet-masters and how far are they willing to go?

The plot takes the reader to a world where ghostwriters work with presidents, (James Patterson and Bill Clinton writing “The President is Missing”), and create presidents, (Tony Schwartz who ghosted “The Art of the Deal”, setting President Trump on the road to becoming the most famous and reviled name in the world).

This is the world of myth-makers, story-tellers and media manipulators – the people who really run the world and the ones who shape the global conversations – and us, the humble scribes who watch and tell.