The Perfect Manhattan: A Novel

Synopsis: As sizzling as a see-and-be-seen night on the town, as lip-smacking as a flawless cosmo, The Perfect Manhattan serves up a dishy tale of bartending among the beautiful people—and provides the ultimate summer cocktail.

Meet Cassie Ellis—a young college graduate with the world on a string, a yen for screenwriting, and a need for fast cash to pay off her student loans. Eager to avoid the lucrative snooze-fest of a reliable consulting job, she shocks everyone she knows by opting for a sexier, more flexible job: mixing drinks. Never mind that she doesn’t know single-malt whiskey from Jack Daniel’s: she’s eager to learn. And under the tutelage of a sexy Soho bar owner, she’s soon cranking out three-olive martinis with the city’s glitterati fifteen-deep at the bar—all while angling for tips, fielding bad pick-up lines, and trying to keep up with the other bartenders who party as hard as their stylish clientele.

When Cassie accepts a summer gig bartending in the Hamptons, New York’s most elite summer destination, she finds herself catapulted into a whirlwind of dazzling celebrity and over-the-top wealth unlike anything she’s ever seen. Life behind the velvet rope is hard to resist, especially when she finds herself falling for a Hamptons hottie named James. But as the summer progresses, and she finds herself surrounded by playboys, moguls, spoiled rich kids, and Paris Hilton clones in strappy stilettos, she soon wonders if playing the ersatz socialite—while actually trying to make a living—is more than she bargained for.

Drawn from the authors’ own experiences as bartenders in the thick of New York’s party scene, The Perfect Manhattan is a perfect mix of sparkling social satire, romance, comedy, and scandal that provides a fast-paced, enormously entertaining look inside the life on the chichi side of the tracks.