Complicit

March 1, 2022

Her Hollywood dreams in ruins, Sarah Lai now works as a lecturer at a lackluster college, but a journalist's questions about her work with star producer Hugo North elicit a desire to set the record straight about the abuse of power that quashed her career. Soon she realizes that she's got some owning up to do as well. Li authored the Edgar finalist Dark Chapter; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

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June 6, 2022
In the uneven latest from Li (Dark Chapter), a film professor looks back with guilt in 2017 on her early producing career and her studio head’s sexual misconduct. In flashbacks, Li reveals how Sarah Lai, raised by a Chinese American family in Flushing, N.Y., feels out of her element at Firefly Films in the West Village, where she tries to navigate the “complicated miasma of egos,” among them those of up-and-coming writer and director Xander Schulz and studio founder Sylvia Zimmerman. After Firefly debuts Xander’s first feature film at Cannes, British billionaire Hugo North backs the company, rebranding Firefly as Conquest. When the shoot for Xander’s latest is moved to Los Angeles, Sarah is left in charge as acting producer and must deal with Xander’s petulance and Hugo’s appetite for beautiful women, drugs, and power. At the center of the production is up-and-coming actor Holly Randolph, now a big star, whose backstory gradually emerges. Li skillfully depicts the ways in which powerful people exploit and abuse those trying to get a foothold in the film industry, though the narrative is at once overlong and underdeveloped, leaving the central theme of complicity underexplored. It ends up being an intriguing if not quite satisfying look at #MeToo in the film industry.

July 1, 2022
Writer, producer, and activist Li (Dark Chapter, 2017) draws on her experience in the film industry to bring authenticity and raw honesty to her second novel, a timely page-turner that explores the emotional impact of sexual assault. In 2017, as the #MeToo movement unfolds, Sarah lectures on screenwriting to mediocre students at a community college far from the lights of Hollywood. Aware of the headlines, she receives a message from a prominent journalist requesting an interview for an investigative piece about a film producer Sarah worked with ten years earlier. Sarah hesitantly meets with him and recounts her introduction to film after college as an intern in a small production company, answering phones and editing scripts, then after several years, assisting producer Sylvia in filming work that's showcased at Cannes. When their project wins the funding of billionaire Hugo North, their fortunes seem assured, but Sarah becomes increasingly uneasy, torn between her Chinese family's expectations and her superiors' demands. Paralyzed by a threatening encounter, she--and her readers--find the lines of responsibilities blurred.

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