Review: Playpet

Playpet by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reads like an episode of Mad Men. Mavis Gunther is our focal character and she’s like the later Peggy, but one who is hyper-aggressive and rotten to the core. The plot here is that the two partners of an ad agency are in the midst of a vicious breakup and Mavis, an account manager, has to choose sides and then chase accounts threatening to leave. She’s smart and ruthless, knows her way around the business, but uses her looks and sex to land new accounts and keep others from leaving. Mavis is a great character creation and Hitt narrates using her strong and unapologetic voice and we get all her strengths and weaknesses and that keeps her from simply being a stereotypical femme fatale. (A note on this book’s format. It’s the size of a pack of cards and is read on the horizontal. Originally part of a two-book set along with Carnival Sin and the books came inside a hard sleeve the size of regular paperback.)