It’s hard to say whether Susan Rigetti (nee Fowler), author of the best-selling memoir “Whistleblower,” has hit the crest of our fascination with con artists, scammers and identity thieves, or if her novel “Cover Story” has just missed the wave. Surely, the crossover with the hit Netflix series “Inventing Anna” is striking (young Russian woman poses as a Germanic heiress, Anna Delvey, to enter New York’s glamour class). In fact, the novel, made up of texts, memos and diary entries, feels screen-ready.

Like the many con-artist biopics popular on TV right now, “Cover Story” is like a bag of Cheetos — you know it’s not great, but you find it very hard to stop snacking. The story of Lora Ricci, a naive college student flailing in New York and hungry to find success as a writer, who gets swept into the world of charismatic scammer Cat Wolff (spoiler alert: not her real name) goes down easy, even if it requires a very willing suspension of disbelief.

You first have to believe there exists someone as haplessly wide-eyed as Lora Ricci, a young woman with no B.S. detector and very little in the way of self-preservation skills. But the biggest — and for anyone who has ever worked in publishing, the funniest — absurdity is the idea that if you just work very, very hard for a year, you can, at the age of 20, write the “perfect” New Yorker story, and then parlay its success in the revered magazine into a seven-figure book deal that will pull you out of poverty and obscurity. It’s hard to believe no one has ever thought of that approach to literary fame before.

The charlatan Delvey infiltrated the world of international art and high finance,Elizabeth Holmeswas after that tech money, but the fictional Cat Wolff sets her sights on book publishing, where the real-world average advance for a first book is between $5,000 and $15,000. Perhaps because Rigetti’s first book on computer programming is still used across Silicon Valley and her second was a memoir about Uber, she is unfamiliar with the life of the average fiction writer. Or, perhaps she was writing what she knows, and what she knows is that particular and often elusive dream of “being a writer.”

If you can get over these stumbling blocks, however, “Cover Story” is a good read. The prose is not breathtaking, the exploration of the human condition is not revelatory, but, man oh man, it’s got suites at the Plaza, the FBI closing in, Russian hackers, designer clothes and a plot that stays ahead of the reader. Rigetti has written a need-to-read story, even if it’s a bit silly.

Whether “Cover Story” becomes the beach read of the season or is lost in the current frenzy for ripped-from-the-headlines stories is yet to be decided. What is established is that Rigetti, like her character Cat Wolff, has a knack for understanding our basest impulses and vulnerabilities and how far we are willing to go to believe a good story.

Cover Story
By Susan Rigetti
(William Morrow; 352 pages; $27.99)