A provocative debut, likely to exercise its film rights.
Not so much a who-dun-it as a who-didn’t, Spiegelman’s first sets its hard-boiled sights on high-finance, money laundering, and extortion.
John March is a country cop turned big-city private dick with a checkered past. After foregoing a lucrative position at the helm of his family’s bank to become a sheriff’s investigator, only to lose everything after shooting the serial killer who murdered his wife, John escapes to Manhattan to do private work for friend and lawyer, Michael Metz. Mike introduces him to Rick Pierro, a big-time Wall Street player with ties to Merchant’s Worldwide Bank, whose roof collapsed after a federal investigation and the disappearances and deaths of key management. Pierro has received a curious fax from an anonymous blackmailer, and though he’s claimed innocence, wishes to comply in a strategic move to salvage his reputation as an honest businessman. Pierro’s wife, Helene, plays aloof, but John keeps returning to question her. Picking up clues, he learns of Gerard Nassouli, the shrewd, lecherous mastermind behind MWB’s illegal practices. Focusing on the weak and elderly, Nassouli mined the corporate world for “pet traders” and cynical vice-presidents, taking them under his wing by introducing them to crooks and drug-cartels working under the auspices of major companies, and, once a deal was struck, cuckolding said pets into money laundering with threats of bodily harm and career-ending videotapes. With his own background in finance and software, Spiegelman makes up an intensely complicated and intriguing plot, at its best precise and suspenseful, at its worst a superfluous muddle. But March is a strong and fatalistic character with a flawless nose for bull. His has run-ins, often violent, with a psychotic G-man; a strong-arm named Trautmann; and various underworld parasites and has-beens. After an underdeveloped love interest, there’s a bloody tying up of loose threads.
A provocative debut, likely to exercise its film rights.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4075-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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