Despite some plot holes and occasionally clunky prose, the book moves quickly and provides a great ride.
A bank executive gets more than he bargained for as he fights for his life, his reputation and his family in this timely financial thriller.
Halsey “Stu” Stuart is a prodigious banking talent—it’s his personal relationships that he can’t quite figure out. Working at his father’s bank in New Jersey, Stu feels suffocated by his unloving CEO patriarch. Despite his wife’s pleas, Stu moves his family to the posh enclave of Fortune Beach, Fla., to work for his brother-in-law, Des Cain. Des is the renegade chairman of the local bank, where many celebrities and wealthy second home owners keep accounts. Fast-forward five years, and Stu has been dragged into an ugly and potentially fatal series of investigations at the bank. It seems that Des has been making hefty commercial loans to friends and business partners with the bank’s money and writing off any delinquency on the accounts. Stu, head of the commercial loan department, has no idea of these transgressions (along with many others, including conflicts of interest with the bank’s chief counsel and de facto money laundering), but he may pay the price nevertheless. Stu is forced into battle to save his reputation and keep himself out of jail—even though they are family, Des would not hesitate to blame everything on Stu. As the Justice Department, FDIC and state agencies close in, the illegal involvement of Don Zale, congressman and chairman of the House Banking Committee, makes the situation even more dire. Fortunately, Stu has a few allies on his side, including a newly protective father and a best friend who knows some important law enforcement agents in Washington. The Fed’s reasons for keeping Stu in Fortune Beach may be a little flimsy, the banking terms may confuse some readers and predicting how all the pieces fall into place may not be terribly difficult, but the novel is still an enjoyable read.
Despite some plot holes and occasionally clunky prose, the book moves quickly and provides a great ride.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-1609104047
Page Count: 269
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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