A fiery, engrossing, and unpredictable financial novel.
A business executive reexamines her priorities and her life in attorney Merriman’s business thriller.
The author’s eighth novel is an enticing tale of international intrigue starring Sarah Taylor-Jones, the 40-year-old long-standing chief financial officer of Park Avenue’s Consolidated Diamonds, a global precious gem wholesaler and the lead rival to jewel-industry behemoth De Beers. Her boss, company owner Luc Johannes, is hoping to soon retire at 68 with “four decades of corporate warfare behind him, along with three ex-wives and three estranged children.” But Consolidated is in serious trouble upon discovering that the Australian mine they draw from will be depleted of gemstones in five years. Life has been difficult for Sarah—she grew up an orphan on Chicago’s South Side—but after graduating from Duke University and the Wharton Business School, she’s had a distinguished career. She’s hoping to tap into Botswana’s prized Debswana Diamond Company, “the most valuable diamond mine in the world,” and purchase their 50% stake to bolster Consolidated’s inventory and rescue the business from financial ruin. But to accomplish this, she needs to outwit De Beers, who owns the other half of the mine and is eager to own the Debswana empire for themselves. Complicating matters further is the involvement of Wang Jin, the hard-partying son of the Chinese Communist Party leader, who also has his sights set on acquiring the Debswana location but needs ready cash to do so. Wang appeals to his ruthless father for capital to finance his bid and continues a reckless campaign to achieve his goal at any cost. As all parties arrive in Africa for an epic showdown, Sarah will have to match wits with her intimidating opponents.
Over the course of the novel, Sarah emerges as a well-developed character—a resourceful businesswoman who’s determined to defend and restore her company to its former lucrative glory. This challenge, in fact, forms the primary action of the novel, which offers a refreshing change of pace for fans of the thriller genre. Woven into Merriman’s corporate drama are themes of race politics—Sarah is biracial—and discussions of the uphill struggle that female executives face in a competitive, male-dominated, and often misogynistic workplace. The story also takes on a new level of interest and intrigue when the action relocates to such locales as Mumbai and South Africa; this has the effect of taking the struggle over the mine’s ownership into deadly territory as the nuances of cutthroat corporate competition play out. The book also delves into the nefarious lengths that the wealthy executives will go to reign supreme, which effectively underscores the sense of melodrama. Merriman’s plot development and story construction prove to be masterful, and he keeps the energy high throughout the narrative. Its short, clipped chapters and frenetic pacing make for a read that’s brisk and enjoyable. Overall, this book is an ideal choice for readers who enjoy riveting suspense tales that are anchored by tough protagonists.
A fiery, engrossing, and unpredictable financial novel.Pub Date: April 9, 2023
ISBN: 979-8386611088
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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