The Fall Line - Softcover

Sullivan, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1521306656 ISBN 13: 9781521306659

Publisher: Independently published, 2017

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Adrenaline-junkie Jack Farrell tanks his promising investment banking career when he launders money for a notorious drug cartel. On the run from both the cartel and the FBI, Jack finds temporary refuge in the quiet of Utah’s mountains. With a new identity and surgically-altered face, he may have narrowly escaped his old life.

But can he run from his own destructive nature?

Bored in the anonymous safety of his new reality, Jack quickly finds himself drawn to Inez Didier, a mysterious French director documenting the high-stakes lives of the world’s most daring skiers. As Inez pulls Jack further into her work, he struggles to keep his thrill-addicted temperament in check. But when the darkest secrets of his thorny past begin to surface, Jack’s life may once again wind up in freefall…

“Not many investigative reporters have the sensitivity and poetry that are exhibited in this exciting story of dare-devil skiing.”—The New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author

Mark Sullivan is the acclaimed author of eighteen novels, including the #1 New York Times bestselling Private series, which he writes with James Patterson. Mark has received numerous awards for his writing, including the WHSmith Fresh Talent Award, and his works have been named a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, and graduated from Hamilton College with a BA in English before working as a volunteer in the Peace Corps in Niger, West Africa. Upon his return to the United States, he earned a graduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and began a career in investigative journalism. An avid skier and adventurer, he lives with his wife in Bozeman, Montana, where he remains grateful for the miracle of every moment.

From Kirkus Reviews

An unintriguing post-felony intrigue with a hero who gets away from it all (dead wife and child, pursuit by Latin American drug lords, burial in federal witness protection program) by hitting the slopes big time. Jack Farrell's an adrenaline addict who--we learn in flashback--responded to the crib death of his baby daughter by whisking his grieving wife, Lena, a nurse wrestling with demons he was only dimly aware of, away from Chicago to California. His boring, lucrative new job there as head of tiny San Diego First Fidelity's foreign investment department offered one chance for excitement: sending the department's capital base skyrocketing by accepting the dubious transactions of Mexican importer-exporter Gabriel Cortez. Jack gradually realized he was getting taken for a ride by a Colombian drug cartel, but he couldn't help himself: ``Farrell was now fully into the world of money-laundering, hooked on the rush, a junkie for danger.'' Now, back in a present sans Lena, his parents, his bank job, and his old identity, he takes a novel approach to going underground, agreeing to appear in megalomaniac film director Inez Didier's documentary on extreme skiing--a devil's compact that'll take him on some hair-raising downhills from Utah to Tahoe to the Tetons, with vampirish Inez constantly devising new challenges (collision-course skiing, skiing blindfolded, skiing on thawed snow) for Jack and his fellow recruits, one-eyed Matthew Page and Rastaman Jerry Milburn (a.k.a The Wave). The endless ski sequences push so hard for excitement that they become narcotizing. Like Jack, Lena, and Gabriel, Inez is battling nasty family memories (Do you think these guys could all be related?) that produce terrific footage, sex-and-power games, and broad portents of disaster. First-novelist Sullivan tries for Hemingway on powder but ends up remaking The Stunt Man with Leni Riefenstahl in the Peter O'Toole role, intercut with soporific flashbacks to a B-grade drug film. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1521306656
• ISBN 13: 9781521306659
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576