A small-town girl fresh out of an Ivy League college lands a job at a prestigious fashion magazine, but wonders if the glamorous perks are worth working for the editor from hell.

Leigh Merrill, a successful young editor at a New York publishing house, returns to her home state of Texas for a writers' conference, where her plans for a quiet retreat are disrupted when she discovers a stack of deeply personal letters from her past in her hotel room.

Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag is walking on cloud nine after a meeting with his editor, Norma Fives, where she predicts his new book is sure to establish him as the next great American author. It has been years since he has even dreamed of such success after a crippling case of writer's block limited his literary aspirations to ghostwriting celebrity memoirs. But his happiness is short-lived when at his next meeting with Norma she asks for his help in discovering...

"What if everything you know about the worst night of your life turns out not to be true? Nine years ago, with the world's eyes on her, Charlie Colbert fled. The press and the police called Charlie a 'witness' to the nightmarish events at her elite graduate school on Christmas Eve-events known to the public as 'Scarlet Christmas'-though Charlie knows she was much more than that. Now, Charlie has meticulously rebuilt her life: She's the editor-in-chief...