A timely but pungent dissection of American commerce.
Energy traders duel for millions of dollars, playing a game as electrical and volatile as the resources they broker.
Best known for co-founding the short-lived literary noir magazine Murdaland, McMeel trades up from short stories to this debut novel. For his tale of financial excess and manipulation, the author delves into his career as a veteran commodity broker but fails to illuminate the arcane trade, despite his best efforts to ape hard-boiled heroes like Mamet. The book largely concerns a gang of young up-and-comers at Allied Power in Boston, whose job is to speculate on the future of energy sources, hoping—like any other commodity, be it stocks, property or sex—to buy low and sell high. McMeel’s window into this barren, mostly male-dominated world is Joe Gallagher, who has a gift for seeing future earnings that his peers can’t imagine. Not that his nascent career doesn’t carry an inherent amount of risk. “Predicting gas, oil, and electricity futures was an easy job when you happened to be right,” McMeel writes. “It was also easy when you were wrong: You got fired.” Soon Gallagher becomes a pawn in a scheme concocted by Milt Harkrader, a brawling, contentious broker with a plan to manipulate the Texas energy market for his own gain. Gallagher is meant to play ball with big-timer Randall Jennings, to create a “Short,” squeezing the market so Harkrader can sell a futures contract in the hope that the product plummets in value. Sound confusing? It is, although McMeel has a demonstrable gift for capturing the terse exchanges and excruciating tensions between his diamond-hard characters.
A timely but pungent dissection of American commerce.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-59431-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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