The Company Man
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £2.99
-
- £2.99
Publisher Description
A trolley car pulls into the station with eleven dead bodies inside. Four minutes before, the factory workers were seen boarding at the previous station. Now, all are dead. And all of them are union.
The year is 1919. The McNaughton Corporation is the pinnacle of American industry. They built airships that crossed the seas. Guns that won the Great War. And above all, they built Evesden: the city of tomorrow, dominated by the immense McNaughton Tower. But something is rotten at the heart of Evesden and one man must uncover its dark secret before it all goes up in flames.
Caught between the union and the company, between the police and the victims, McNaughton investigator Cyril Hayes must find the truth behind the city of the future. Because if he doesn't . . . he's history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The genius of a single 19th-century visionary financier transforms the early 20th century into a grimy, corrupt setting in Bennett's (Mr. Shivers) latest. In a world dominated by California's powerful and secretive McNaughton Corporation, the aspirations of the rising working class conflict with the desire of the moneyed class (specifically the ber-powerful McNaughtons) to remain firmly in control. Investigators Hayes and Samantha Fairbanks find themselves caught up in the oddly subdued conflict between unions and management while investigating a violent mass murder, inextricably entangled with McNaughton's hidden past and the future looming for everyone else. Bennett's unusual steampunk setting feels out of place in this gloomy, pessimistic novel. The prose is competent, but the tale it tells is a bit dull. Furthermore, the final despairing revelation, despite messianic overtones, reflects on the general malaise in American Science Fiction without building on it.
