Meet Steven Stelfox.

London, 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where no one knows anything and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public.

Fueled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine, Stelfox blithely criss-crosses the globe—New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn—searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.

But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.

Kill Your Friends is a dark, satirical, and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business—a place populated by frauds, charlatans, and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved—as long as you want it badly enough.

Emma McAvoy is beautiful, intelligent, and radiantly talented. She lives in a star-studded world of wealth and privilege, but she is about to discover that fame is no protection at all when someone wants you dead.

All she has to do is close her eyes and she remembers the magical day her father came into her life. She was a frightened, lonely toddler, hiding from her mother's wrath, when Brian McAvoy swept in and took her away. She didn't know then that she was his illegitimate daughter or that she had just been rescued by pop music's rising new star. All she knew was that suddenly she felt safe.

Brian's new wife became Emma's loving stepmother, his band members her surrogate uncles, and soon Emma even had a new baby brother to care for. Then, just when everything seemed perfect, a horrifying event shattered all their lives: a botched kidnapping attempt, shocking the world, traumatizing Emma, leaving her bereft of her newfound happiness.

Yet now, after so many years of pain and guilt, of being overprotected and hounded by the press, Emma finally feels as if she's put the tragedy behind her. A determined, self-sufficient young woman, she has carved out a thrilling career and even dared to fall rapturously in love. But the man who will become her husband isn't all that he seems. And Emma is about to awaken to the chilling knowledge that the darkest secret of all is the one buried in her mind—a secret that someone may kill to keep.