| Details | | Publication Date: | 1998-07-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 385 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 24.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
An adrenaline-pumping story that also delivers surprisingly shrewd ruminations on the frustrations of modern life. Brutally fired after several years of working for a successful computer magazine, Ned Allen desperately solicits employment from a somewhat disreputable real estate tycoon. All too soon, he realizes the terrible, irrevocable repercussions of his Faustian bargain.
Industry Reviews
Kennedy presents an amusing and poignant portrait of what becomes of the downsized: the rGesumGe perfecting, the social dynamics of finessing the reasons for the job loss, and temping as a telephone marketer. He captures the angst and anxiety. . . . This is a quick paced, fascinating look at the cutthroat world of salesmanship and corporate downsizing.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Coughlin
Caught up in money laundering, murder, and the loss of his sensible wife (by far the most sympathetic character), Ned stumbles through a series of confrontations with criminals and with his soul. For a jazzier view of high-tech shenanigans, stick to Po Bronson's novels. For a view of the computer industry, look elsewhere--Ned could be any salesman, anywhere, but he's no Willy Loman.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Coughlin
Probably most computer industry denizens are salesmen of one kind or another immensely valuable when they close a sale, immensely expensive otherwise. In this second novel by the author of The Big Picture (Hyperion, 1997), Ned Allen sells ads in a computer trade magazine until it is suddenly sold and he finds himself jobless and unemployable through his own impetuous behavior. An old friend offers a job that seems too good to be true and that could be the death of poor Ned. Caught up in money laundering, murder, and the loss of his sensible wife (by far the most sympathetic character), Ned stumbles through a series of confrontations with criminals and with his soul. For a jazzier view of high-tech shenanigans, stick to Po Bronson's novels. For a view of the computer industry, look elsewhere Ned could be any salesman, anywhere, but he's no Willy Loman. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/98.] Elsa Pendleton, Boeing Information Svces., Inc., Ridgecrest, CA
Auerbach
Kennedy's first novel, The Big Picture (1997), was a riveting commercial thriller that was perhaps overhyped. His second, though it shares the first book's galloping pace and strong sense of close-of-century angst among the well-fixed, seems, two-thirds of the way through, to give up the ghost for what reads like an overplotted, underwritten homage to Grisham. Ned Allen is a brash young ad salesman for a striving computer magazine in Manhattan, and the perils and pleasures of such a life are brilliantly set out in the opening chapters. Then a German conglomerate (in what may be a particularly timely reference among book people) takes over, and disaster strikes. In no time, Ned is without a job and, because of a quarrel he got into with a powerful space buyer and an enraged swing at his creepy German boss, is perhaps unemployable. Meanwhile, wife Lizzie is tiring of his remoteness and tantrums. To the rescue comes an old school chum who works for a high-profile but shady real estate tycoon, and Ned finds himself enmeshed in money laundering and murder with him as the suspect. The concluding chapters brim with Grishamesque ploys: offshore bank accounts are manipulated, traps are set, time is running out. The trouble is that Ned's world has been so accurately and meticulously set forth early in the book that all this breathless, barely credible skullduggery seems to belong to a different, and poorer, book entirely. Kennedy can certainly make the pages turn; he must learn to make them turn to more consistently rewarding effect. $500,000 joint marketing campaign with Big Picture paperback; author tour. (July)
Lopate
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