Where the Truth Lies (film vs book)

I tripped over Atom Egoyan’s film Where the Truth Lies via a Netflix recommendation.  I was massively disappointed.  The film stars Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a 1950s comedy-singing duo, who break up under mysterious circumstances after a dead girl is discovered in the hotel suite they are about to check into.  The point of view character is a young journalist who idolized them when she was a small child, and is writing a biography of one of them in the 1970s.  It wants to be a film noir mystery, but can’t quite get its act together to do so.  Fortunately, the credits note that the source material is a novel by Rupert Holmes (who you know for “The Pina Colada Song” and the plays Drood and Accomplice), and the novel is everything the movie should have been.  It's a send-up of Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” and provides the full story of our intrepid girl journalist chasing down the reasons for the team’s break up, their sexual predilections, the quirks of their entourages, and surrounding oddness.  It is a fully formed story, rather than the cartoon Egoyan attempted to get past the censors at the MPAA.  We have a real whodunit plot with murder, blackmail, suicide, mistaken identity, and several interesting switchbacks in the path.  This is the story I would have expected from Holmes, who, in Accomplice, was a subtle and sneaky storyteller.