The Job
'A furiously paced, compulsive thriller' The Times
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- 5,49 €
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- 5,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Readers say:
'Classic Kennedy. Brilliant plot, wonderful dialogue and characters. You are bowled over by the pace.'
'Excellent five star read from the first to the last page'
'If you haven't read any of Douglas Kennedy books please do'
Ned Allen is young, smart, and upwardly mobile. Several years into his career as an ad salesman for a successful computer magazine, Ned's finally left his small-town roots behind, and is certain that the sophisticated Manhattan world he covets is his forever. His wife Lizzie is also a rising star of a prestigious PR firm. It seems that Ned's made it.
But then what appeared to be a career break shows its true colours. Ned's forced to make some tough calls, among them a question of ethics and the small matter of whether to lie to his wife - and when the tough calls just keep getting tougher he finds himself on the brink of losing everything ...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.