Where has Harmony's father been all these years?
Ambling. Rambling. Scrambling. The usual.

Does Coca-Cola really offer secret product placement deals to people in the news?
I can't confirm this. But the cynical side of me says that if it's not happening now, it'll happen soon.

Why did Maxina tell Harmony about Lisa Glassman?
To undermine Harmony's unyielding faith in Scott. She wouldn't have done it if she didn't think that Scott had gone way off the deep end, and was threatening to take the whole campaign with him.

But Scott was right about one thing: it was Maxina's first bad move.

Why do Scott and Maxina think that raw footage from a four-year-old documentary will save Harmony's public image once she confesses?
Because they hope some carefully chosen segments of the documentary will provide some sympathetic perspective on Harmony, since the media certainly won't be going out of their way to cast her in a positive light once she admits to lying.

On page 341, Scott claims that Hannibal opened at $22.4 million when in reality it opened at $58.1 million. What's up with that?
In reality, we didn't have a massive school shooting occur eight days before the movie's premiere. Needless to say, the "Annabelle Shane reaction" had greatly affected the first weekend box office numbers. But notice how Ira's Move My Cheese program would have been dead-on accurate if Annabelle hadn't gone postal (p. 341).

Madison seems to think that the Kournikova virus was engineered by Anna Kournikova's publicists. What do you think?
Madison's theory is clever but wrong. The author of the virus turned out to be a 20-year-old Dutch nerd who simply thought Anna was hot. For the trouble he caused, he was sentenced to 150 hours of community service. That's damn lucky, considering that the guy behind the Melissa virus got 20 months in federal prison.

But the sultry Russian tennis star certainly did benefit from the exposure. Hell, it was the next best thing to winning a tournament, which apparently she's never done.

Wasn't it dumb for Harmony to talk on the phone with Scott right as she was walking past all the news cameras? (p. 348)
Only if there were boom mikes hovering over her head (which there weren't). It was too loud and too busy to make out anything she was saying.

Of course the deaf lipreaders in Scott's life might have gotten a eyeful of interesting chatter if they were really paying attention (which they weren't).

How does Madison figure out that Scott and Harmony are in cahoots just from a matching pair of cell phones?
For starters, the cell phones are quite unique in appearance. Second, Scott has been acting all weird and secretive with his own phone for days now, so Madison was already suspicious. Third, Scott had gone upstairs to talk on his phone right as Harmony was talking on hers. Finally, as Madison herself admits on page 350, she tends to jump to the craziest, darkest explanation of things. And that's about as dark and crazy as you can get.

Of course in this case, she just happened to be right. But that's a whole separate issue.


Previous: Chapter 17
Next: Chapter 19

Buy the Book Contact Me Back to Home