DEAD MONEY

Tech insider Kerr’s twisty, propulsive debut explores Silicon Valley’s dark side through the eyes of a wily outsider heroine.

A few weeks after Trevor Canon, the founder and CEO of one of tech’s hottest startups, Journy (think Uber or Lyft), was shot to death in his San Francisco office, Mackenzie Clyde, a lawyer-turned-investigator for venture capitalist Roger Hammersmith, is ordered by her boss to join the FBI probe as an adviser. At stake is the $5 billion that Roger’s firm had invested in Journy, now frozen because of a “dead money” provision that Trevor added to his will shortly before his killing. His assets can only be released when someone is tried for his murder. Teaming up with FBI agent Jameson Danner and Journy’s liaison to the investigation, COO Eleanor Eden (whose high-flying career resembles Sheryl Sandberg’s), Mackenzie embarks on a suspenseful hunt for an elusive killer that ends in an explosive climax at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Alternating chapters reveal key events from Mackenzie’s past that have shaped her life. This surprising nesting doll of a thriller, in which no one is who they appear to be, layers one story inside another within another. Despite his sometimes-clunky writing (the characters “smirk” at least 24 times), Kerr has created one of the most memorable female thriller protagonists in recent years. Striking not only because of her unusually tall height, the independent Mackenzie is determined to control her destiny in a male-dominated industry.

A sharply observed portrait of the tech world and the role ambitious women play in it.