Publisher Description
Everything about Jonah Gray screams success -movie-star good looks, expensive clothes, a Park Avenue penthouse, and a seven-figure income. A cutthroat, rainmaking New York city commercial real estate broker, Jonah craves opulence and power. He beds models, romps the globe on the weekends and sees the world as his for the taking. Jonah Gray has it all. Or at least he had it all. When a friend presents Jonah with the deal of a lifetime, Jonah jumps at the chance. All Jonah has to do is act quickly, invest half a billion dollars in prime NY office buildings, and collect a huge payoff. But this golden opportunity is anything but. Within days of signing on, Jonah is mysteriously thrust into the epicenter of an international and personal scandal. Forced to explore a whole new territory where he can trust no one, and where danger, death and deception lurk at every corner, Jonah will learn some painfully hard lessons about the quest for easy money. Closing this deal could mean losing everything.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weak prose, including ill-chosen similes ("My mind started throwing around possibilities like swelling kernels in a popcorn maker") and artless attempts to reduce New York City's commercial real estate world to a laundry list of adjectives, mars Gittlin's second thriller (after 2004's The Men Downstairs). Jonah Gray, a young, ambitious New York City commercial real estate broker, has a taste for the fast life. His insatiable hunger for challenging work meets his match when an old friend, Russian gas mogul Andreu Zhamovsky, asks him to arrange a purchase of property worth $500 million in three weeks. After Gray mobilizes his equally high-charged partners, the team crafts an ingenious strategy to simultaneously pursue three separate deals to maximize their options and leverage. But the story takes an implausible turn after someone plants a stolen Faberge egg on Gray, leading him to wonder who's setting him up and why. The author, a commercial real estate executive himself, provides an authentic view of his professional world, but the far-fetched plot and a thoroughly unsympathetic main character make for a lackluster read.
