After having penned a wildly successful YA novel, Mallory Maddox has been bereft of inspiration. She seemingly has a nice enough life, with the money from her book and her husband Ronan’s position as a creative executive at Netflix affording them a good deal of luxury and keeping them surrounded by other “interesting” people. But Mallory sometimes finds herself feeling trapped by it all and disappointed in her own inability to write something new.

She drinks too much during one of Ronan’s parties and after the guests have left and he has fallen asleep, she finds herself at her laptop Googling how to write a bestseller. The results suggest that punishingly tragic queer stories (think Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life) are trending and convinces herself that she could easily churn one out, having lost a gay brother to suicide years prior. She realizes that she doesn’t really know much about the gay community or the experience of life as a gay man, but figures she should be able to learn what she needs through research, and so immediately sets about doing so in the worst way possible: surreptitiously taking photographs of her attractive, sleeping husband and using them to create a Grindr profile in order to meet men who she can gather information from.

Before long she is heading into the night on a comically delusional quest to meet one of the men she’s been catfishing. Her plans of course don’t work out, but in the process she encounters Leo, a strikingly handsome young man who’s been hustling on the street in order to feed his various addictions. His story is perfect, tragic and shocking in the best way possible and she instantly senses she has a hit on her hands. The only problem being that she needs to find a way to get him to tell it to her without letting on what she intends to do. But Leo has his own purposes for talking with her and before long the pair find themselves locked into a dangerous dance while other outside threats also emerge.

There is little chance of guessing where this story will take you as you’re reading it. Mixing vicious, publishing industry satire with social commentary and domestic suspense, Fruit Fly keeps the reader furiously turning the pages late into the night, eager to see where it will lead us next.

Told in chapters that alternate between Mallory and Leo’s points of view, Silver has crafted a pair of truly unreliable narrators that still somehow manage to elicit a great deal of empathy as we watch their competing schemes play out. Mallory’s naïveté around the community she hopes to portray leads to some genuinely laugh-out-loud bits of internal dialog as her end goal raises thoughtful questions about authorship and who should be allowed to tell certain kinds of stories—while leaving us to wonder who are we to judge?

Leo’s story on the other hand is more immediately tragic, though the same charm and way with words he uses to manipulate others to his will makes him oddly endearing to us as well. Neither can be fully trusted and both have more in common than they think, something they and we slowly realize as each of their situations becomes more perilous.

Silver’s writing is slick and easy to read, even if it lacks some of the marks of truly great literature. He expertly doles out information, keeping us on our toes as he leads us towards a finale and a denouement that are each apt, unpredictable, and unforgettable. Fans of this Summer’s hit Yesteryear will eat this up, but anyone looking for an expertly plotted bit of dark suspense will find it worthy of all the buzz. This is a must-read. ★★★★½