Morgan Richter w/ Cherie Priest, THE UNDERSTUDY

"The first time my understudy tried to K*ll me was on the day we met. We got off on the wrong foot, Yolanda and I, and while most of that was due to Yolanda being a very . . . complicated individual, some of the blame lies with me..."

After years of rigorous instruction and ensemble work, Kit finally gets her big break when she’s hired to play the lead role in a new opera based on the 1960s cult classic film Barbarella. Entrusted with playing the beautiful and seductive titular role, Kit is on her way to the top of the highly competitive world of New York City opera. But then she walks into rehearsal and meets her understudy. Stunning, suggestive, and bursting with the unbridled confidence of a novice, Yolanda is physically everything Barbarella is meant to be. At first, Kit isn’t threatened by the neophyte, until Yolanda reveals that she wants the role—and will do anything to get it.

As Yolanda's schemes become increasingly more reckless, she draws an unwitting Kit into her orbit. But when a brutal M**der destabilizes the company and threatens her role, Kit discovers that Yolanda's glamorous veneer conceals something much more sinister. Hunting down the betrayed friends and discarded lovers from Yolanda’s past and unearthing secrets she’s worked hard to bury, Kit realizes just how far Yolanda is willing to go to get what she wants, and the number of enemies she made in the process.

Morgan Richter is the author of The Divide. A graduate of the Filmic Writing Program at the University of Southern Califor­nia’s film school, she has worked in production on several tele­vision shows, including ABC’s America’s Funniest Home Videos and E! Entertainment Television’s Emmy-winning comedy series Talk Soup. She is an avid popular culture critic and the author of Duranalysis: Essays on the Duran Duran Experience. Richter currently lives in Seattle.

Cherie Priest is the author of two dozen books and novellas including mysteries and gothic horror projects The Toll, The Family Plot, and the Philip K. Dick Award nominee Maplecroft; but she is perhaps best known for the steampunk pulp adventures of the Clockwork Century, beginning with Boneshaker. Her works have been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction and have won the Locus Award (among others)—and over the years, they’ve been translated into nine languages in eleven countries. ​Cherie lives in Seattle, WA, with a menagerie of exceedingly photogenic animals.​

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