A solid, action-packed financial thriller, ideal for beach reading.
A Wall Street golden boy applies the skills he learned while working for the CIA in this debut novel.
From Beirut to Pakistan to Russia to the nation of Georgia to New York, this tale breathlessly travels the globe as Jarrod Stryker races to rescue his Wall Street firm from financial ruin and certain criminal prosecution due to his mentor’s mismanagement. Readers are in Big Short territory here with lots of talk of CDOs, unhedged positions, and discretionary equity accounts. “Extraordinary measures have to be taken,” Stryker resolves. This involves the necessity of oil prices dropping below a certain benchmark, and a Stryker-devised “Hail Mary” juggling of funds—a scheme given a high rate of success by Icarus, the firm’s $8 million supercomputer. “Either you are totally insane, or you have the biggest set of stones on Wall Street,” a co-worker tells him. But Chechen militants, led by “the Russian bin Laden,” blow up a Russian pipeline, sending oil prices up. Before they can strike again, it is up to Stryker to rely on his CIA training to neutralize them and drive prices down. He reunites with former fellow operative and lover Sarah Kashvilli, for whom he had “fallen on his sword,” resulting in Stryker being drummed out of the agency. Gupta writes credibly about the financial maneuverings while building suspense regarding what the terrorists are up to. Humor is not his strong suit, and the prose at times can be inelegant (“Sheila and Don looked as if they had just had a bowel movement”). Stryker and Sarah are slated to return in a sequel in 2017. That’s too long to wait for Sarah, who deserves a book of her own. She possesses an intriguing back story and spectacular sniper and combat skills that, in one of the book’s most audacious set pieces, impress even a Delta Force commander. Parachuting off a mesa’s edge, grenades in each hand, Sarah single-handedly takes out a truck containing four members of al-Qaida.
A solid, action-packed financial thriller, ideal for beach reading.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-34672-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: KadaMedia Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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