Paper Throne

Margaret Perkins is the most feared woman in publishing-and she has worked very hard to earn that title. Behind her corner office, her mountain of review copies, and her devastating column in The Meridian Review, lies a system she has built piece by piece over twenty years: the strategic destruction of her predecessor, the calculated removal of a senior editor who stood between her and a bigger chair, the quiet extraction of adoration and favors from young authors desperate for her approval, and a scheme to sell advance review copies for unreported cash that has made her considerably wealthier than her salary suggests.
Her assistant, Amy Morrow, has spent four years learning the job-and watching. When Amy finally photographs Margaret loading the suitcase bound for Cornerstone Books, she has a choice to make. And the choice she makes will not deliver what she expected. Paper Throne is a literary novel about ambition without conscience, power without accountability, and what it costs a person-any person-to want something badly enough to use people to get it.
Told with precision, dark humor, and unflinching honesty, it is a story about the price of ambition and the unexpected weight of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.