In May 2002 an article in The Times warned male readers of an unusual publicity stunt. A beautiful French actress was going round London's bookshops and striking up flirtatious conversations with male customers. If they asked for her number, she gave them a card on which was written not a telephone number, but the ISBN number of a new book together with the words "If you want to meet me again, you'll find me in the pages of The Decoy." The stunt echoed the opening scene of the thriller, in which an English actress in New York earns her rent money by working as a decoy for a detective agency.

The actress involved in the stunt, Benedicte Le Lay , reported that in the four City bookshops she visited she attracted male attention within moments, whereas in the University bookshop in Gower Street she was completely ignored, even when she tried to start a conversation. In the Oxford Street mega-bookstores it was the Cookery and Poetry sections which drew the friskiest readers, while Erotica turned out to be less sexy than History.