by Glenn Kaplan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2007
On the downside, there’s little mystery, less danger to the hero and a clunky prose style that makes Joseph Finder, who owns...
A rising exec intent on clawing his way to the top finds that the claws of his competitors and apparent allies are sharper than his in this high-fatality, low-suspense thriller.
Ken Olson, a “tall, thin 34-year-old executive with blond hair and pale blue eyes,” is on the fast track. Despite repeated pleas from his loving wife, Sandy, to move to a smaller company than Ayvil Plastics, he’s determined to impress the new hatchet man, Executive Vice President Tom Pennington, during their tête-à-tête on the way from the airport. It all works better than Ken could have dreamed. Pennington instantly accepts Ken’s plan to cut costs instead of closing the plant and names Ken Division Director. But sharks are already circling Pennington himself. Ayvil CEO Arch Paulson, furious that he isn’t shutting down Ayvil Plastics, is hatching plots to discredit him with all the fire-breathing gusto of a Shakespearean baddie, and soon a breathtaking act of industrial sabotage claims a thousand lives at the plant. Ken, a broken man, is turned into an avenger by a further backstabbing coup de grace. Joining forces with Sandra’s brother, industrial-security expert Phil Lambert, he resolves to go after the men who ruined him. That’s a tall order because (1) there are lots of them, (2) they’re fabulously wealthy, powerful, manipulative and unscrupulous, (3) they’re not necessarily the guys Ken thinks they are (though few readers will be so guileless). Kaplan (All for Money, 1993) keeps the pot boiling vigorously, provides low-key guidance to the Machiavellian plots and counterplots hatching in half a dozen executive suites, and confirms every dastardly stereotype his enormous target audience has about big business: “Mass firing? Mass murder? It’s such a short step.”
On the downside, there’s little mystery, less danger to the hero and a clunky prose style that makes Joseph Finder, who owns this territory, sound like Proust.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-765-31618-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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