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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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