A gripping novel that vividly captures the dark cosmos of financial malfeasance.
An investigative reporter is granted the opportunity to join the elite world of billionaires in Nesbit’s crime novel.
Seth Thomas, a seasoned reporter for the Washington Post, is deflated by the decline of journalism in America and fed up with a “viciously amoral financial and digital world” that scorns the truth as unprofitable. “I was mentally exhausted constantly fighting the good fight. Who cared whether you got it right any longer? I did. But hardly anyone else in America seemed to. So what was the point?” Suddenly, he’s granted a unique point of access into the murky world of financial corruption: the chance to participate as a deep-pocketed investment mogul. Mysteriously, he is given an office, a secretary (the astonishingly talented Dotty Rungren), and an apparently unlimited bank account. Neither Seth nor Dotty have any idea who their anonymous benefactor might be (“it’s right across the street from the White House, so I figured it was for something important. I didn’t ask questions”), nor how much money available to them, though they are assured by bank representatives that their funds all but inexhaustible—a fantastical scenario artfully rendered plausible by the author. All of a sudden, Seth is a major financial player and becomes investment partners with Ivan Fedorisky, a vastly wealthy Russian entrepreneur with ties to the Russian mob. Seth decides to gamble his newfound wealth—$10 billion of it—to forge connections with the biggest, and presumably most corrupt, participants in the global financial market; the kinds of powerful people whose names showed up in the infamous Panama Papers. Finally, Seth will be faced with a terrible choice—he can pursue this extraordinary story, at the cost of considerable personal sacrifice, or he can secure the money—it doesn’t seem possible to do both.
Nesbit’s tale is a remarkable brew of mystery and political intrigue in which the protagonist explores a rarefied world of nihilistic corruption that includes the upper echelons of the American political class. Literary portrayals of this strange universe tend to be either comic-book fantasies brimming with melodramatic hyperbole or insipidly stale—the author here manages to realistically depict the shadowy corridors of wealth and power with electricity while avoiding gratuitous flights of fancy. Also, Seth is a mesmerizingly complex character, motivated, at least in part, by curiosity: “I had no desire to be a master of the universe. But some part of me wanted to test-drive it a bit. I wanted to see what the inside of that game looked like. Not because I wanted anything for myself, or because I wanted to write about it or expose it. I wanted to know.” The plot flirts with gratuitous complication bordering on convolution—any novel built around following a money trail threatens to devolve into an accounting puzzle. However, Nesbit has a strange talent for making this aspect seem playfully mysterious—rather than feeling stymied by bewilderment, the reader is more likely to feel inspired to think through the possibilities. This is an engrossing tale—thoughtful, worldly, and deeply entertaining.
A gripping novel that vividly captures the dark cosmos of financial malfeasance.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781610885980
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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