Four white-collar friends are caught up in an investigation when one of their own is accused of bribing government officials in Reman’s debut thriller.
Carl Messina is the only one of his friends still at the accounting firm where the four of them started more than 20 years ago. Marc is a lawyer, Ken heads a company’s tax department, and Kavi, Carl’s best friend, is CFO at American Dynamics Group. When ADG is accused of bribery, initially at a construction project in the Ukraine and later at plants in other countries, the Securities and Exchange Commission sends Gary Bevins. The SEC generally handles civil matters but is working with the Department of Justice to investigate the case as a criminal offense. And Gary, it seems, is gunning for Kavi, compiling all the evidence, including statements from ADG employees and officers, against him. Carl, Marc and Ken scramble to find a way to help their friend, but since the SEC’s case is so strong, they may have to resort to a solution that’s not exactly within the scope of the law. This is a staunch corporate thriller that forefronts white-collar crime. The novel ably deploys the traditional hero and villain roles. The physically capable Ken, with “muscles on his muscles,” does help devise “the Plan,” but he proves far less helpful than Marc or Carl. Gary is a formidable opponent, and his razor-sharp, mature intellect, especially when interrogating Kavi, belies his youthful appearance—Kavi’s first impression is that the bowtie-sporting Gary looks like a teenager. The relationships among the friends are strong; the book opens with the men at their annual get-together, commemorating their dinner as recruits at the firm, and occasionally flashes back to their meals and conversations throughout the years. In comparison, Carl’s romance with Vicki, an asset-protection attorney hired for Kavi, is feeble. The love he inevitably develops for her seems based solely on Vicki’s bodily attributes.
A crafty thriller in which characters’ wits are their weapons and crimes are often committed without anyone taking notice.
Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491725061
Page Count: 320
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
A treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.
A hardy band of big-box retail employees must dig down for their personal courage when ghosts begin stalking them through home furnishings.
You have to give it up for the wave of paranormal novels that have plagued the last decade in literature; at least they’ve made writers up their games when it comes to finding new settings in which to plot their scary moments. That’s the case with this clever little horror story from longtime pop-culture journalist Hendrix (Satan Loves You, 2012, etc.). Set inside a disturbingly familiar Scandinavian furniture superstore in Cleveland called Orsk, the book starts as a Palahniuk-tinged satire about the things we own—the novel is even wrapped in the form of a retail catalog complete with product illustrations. Our main protagonist is Amy, an aimless 24-year-old retail clerk. She and an elderly co-worker, Ruth Anne, are recruited by their anal-retentive boss, Basil (a closet geek), to investigate a series of strange breakages by walking the showroom floor overnight. They quickly uncover two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, who have stayed in the store to film a reality show called Ghost Bomb in hopes of catching a spirit on tape. It’s cute and quite funny in a Scooby Doo kind of way until they run across Carl, a homeless squatter who's just trying to catch a break. Following an impromptu séance, Carl is possessed by an evil spirit and cuts his own throat. It turns out the Orsk store was built on the remains of a brutal prison called the Cuyahoga Panopticon, and its former warden, Josiah Worth, has returned from the dead to start up operations again. It sounds like an absurd setting for a haunted-house novel, but Hendrix makes it work to the story’s advantage, turning the psychological manipulations and scripted experiences that are inherent to the retail experience into a sinister fight for survival.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59474-526-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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