The Divide

A failed actress turned grifting psychic searches for her missing doppelgänger and is plunged into a web of murder and corruption among Hollywood A-listers.

＂Weird and wonderfully addictive--reads like Agatha Christie on acid, or maybe Raymond Chandler adapted by the Coen Brothers.＂ --Ernest Cline, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Ready Player One

When Jenny St. John was eighteen, she moved to Los Angeles from her rural midwestern hometown and scored the lead role in an independent film called The Divide. Under the intimate direction of young auteur Serge Grumet, Jenny was on her way to becoming the next indie darling. But then the movie tanked, and Jenny never caught a second break. Now, two decades later, after floundering on the fringes of the entertainment industry, she’s barely keeping afloat running a low-level grift as a psychic life coach.

But when news surfaces that Serge has been murdered, Jenny’s life is turned upside down. Unbeknownst to Jenny, Serge’s ex-wife, painter Gena Santos, looks alarmingly similar to Jenny. So much so that when Gena goes missing, the cops think Jenny is Gena.

Jenny finds herself pulled into Gena’s world and manages to leverage both her resemblance to Gena and her faux psychic abilities to infiltrate the affluent yet unstable inner circle of friends, which include a Korean pop idol-turned-social media star and an Oscar-winning actress-turned-wellness guru. Soon Jenny’s search to find Gena unearths dark secrets about her own past while putting her squarely in the sights of a killer.

MORGAN RICHTER is a graduate of the Filmic Writing program at the University of Southern California’s film school and 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. An avid popular culture critic, she is the author of Duranalysis: Essays on the Duran Duran Experience and has amassed a cult following on her analyses of classic Duran Duran videos. She has self-published five novels, but The Divide is her first foray into traditional publishing. Richter currently lives in Seattle.