The Standing Appointment

Six strangers walk into a warehouse to quit smoking. The first rule: you're not allowed to.

Mara has smoked her last cigarette twenty-one times. This is the twenty-second - seven days, no phones, run by a nurse who says willpower is the very reason she keeps failing. She doesn't trust him. She's also run out of other options.

But the diary the six of them are keeping is worth a fortune to the wrong people, and the grey car across the road hasn't moved since dawn. The man inside it believes people are only their patterns - that he can predict, to the minute, which of them will crack first. He's usually right. And he has until the seventh day, because the moment all six of them finish, the thing they've built goes free to the entire world.

The Standing Appointment reads like a grounded corporate thriller - Michael Clayton with no gunfire - and works like nothing else on the shelf. Because hidden inside the story, scene by scene, is a complete and genuine method for stopping smoking. Nobody remembers a lecture. Everybody remembers a story.