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
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
BOOK REVIEW
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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
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