Ben has been obsessed with megastar Jack Whitlock far longer than he’s worked as a paparazzo: As a teenager in Las Vegas, he went to the drive-thru theater to watch the actor, and later he got a job bussing tables at the diner where Whitlock shot scenes for his Vegas-set film Double or Nothing. Since the movie came out, Ben reflects, “Jack Whitlock has been a presence in my life.” But Jack’s image has been rocked by leaked photos of him having sex with a college student. Ben, who’s long dreamed of photographing Jack, becomes obsessed with finding the star in the wake of these revelations, stalking connections to Jack and his wife on social media, through informants, and elsewhere, always one step behind the elusive man. Flashback sections of the book, meanwhile, chart the course of Ben’s relationship with Ellory, a Vegas showgirl who reluctantly follows him to LA. As Ben becomes a more and more accomplished paparazzo, his moral compass grows increasingly skewed, leading to the collapse of his relationship with Ellory. In both timelines, the distant first-person narration ably demonstrates how disconnected Ben is not only from any sense of morality but also from his own emotions. He chooses work over Ellory time and again, skipping Thanksgiving and ignoring her calls; in the present timeline, he goes on dates only with women he thinks might have tips for him. His most meaningful relationship is with his idea of Jack Whitlock, a phantom ideal of masculinity with whom Ben is also ambiguously sexually fixated: “All of these images of him,” Ben thinks, “like the images of a father, a best friend, a lover, a god.”