Fame: I’m gonna live for ever, I’m going to make it to heaven, light up the sky like a flame. So goes the old song. Enola Mazzeri, lead singer of girl band Breathe and sometime owner of the Penthouse may well never have heard it, but her mum certainly did. Catherine Cooper’s The Penthouse combines a high body count with bitchiness, jealousy and backstabbing galore, all firmly planted within manufactured popular culture. I loved it but have come away feeling as though I’m complicit with something entirely rotten.

Here’s what happened: in 2004 Enola went with her best mate Becki to a TV talent show audition. Becki was up for it, Enola wasn’t, but it was Enola who was chosen for stardom, becoming lead singer of manufactured girl band Breathe. Her bandmates hate her but hey they become enormous. Enola starts a relationship with Max, part of a similarly artificial boyband, This Way Up. But in 2008 Enola disappears from her penthouse (which is by the way on London’s South Bank with a view utterly dissimilar to that on the book’s cover). No trace of her can be found. Fast forward to 2024 and the remaining members of Breathe and This Way Up are to reunite in Vegas for two concerts. Fans want to know: will Enola choose this moment to reappear?

The first thing we learn is that Catherine Cooper does not like her characters. All but two of them are appalling human beings. The band members are terrible. The pop svengali and the publicist are awful. The fans are deluded idiots. The mother is horrible. What happens when they all come together is ugly and obscene, but set to a banging melody and an intoxicating rhythm.

You can make excuses for some. The band members live the high life, but their humanity is extinguished. The business people know how to get the most out of their talent, but they are extractive. The mum is partly the product of bad things that happened to her. We readers are of course closest to the deluded idiots: we’re close enough to be sucked into a world that is both real and utterly fake but if some of us think that we’re above it all, we’re just setting ourselves up to be deceived still further. And it’s our money that keeps this world turning.

Once Cooper gets into her stride, we don’t want to look away – this is when the intoxicating rhythm kicks in. The chapters are short, with alternative points of view and a mixed timeline that flits between 2008 and 2024 (I mentioned in my review of Cooper’s The Island that I normally loathe this device but she executes it brilliantly). This book lives in just-one-more-chapter territory. We try to think about every possible outcome but we don’t spend too long on it because we just have to carry on going. By the end, the audacious end, we’ve been thrown enough clues to have worked some of it out but the twist, when it comes, is brilliant, makes perfect sense and challenges our own morality. Justice isn’t done, but what would justice look like in this ridiculous world?

Around the time that I started this book, I inadvertently listened to Steps’ cover version of Tragedy. It is a musical destruction rather than a creation, but I then sought out the video, a goofy, good-natured and ridiculous production. It’s fun and completely misses the point of the original song. The contrast between the two kept coming back to me as I considered Cooper’s presentation of the music business where the froth on top is brilliant but the beans are bitter. And from the penthouse, remember, you get a great view but there’s a long way to fall.

Thanks to HarperCollins for the review copy and to Anne Cater for the blog tour invitation.