The Job

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.

An up-and-coming ad exec tossed out on his ear finds a new job that's a bargain with the Devil, in a glossy, fast-moving, by-the-numbers thriller from Douglas (The Big Picture, 1997). ``Results mean everything,'' says Ned Allen. Results have boosted him up the ladder to regional sales manager for CompuWorld's ad pages, and results have won him a nice SoHo apartment, a well-stocked wardrobe, a tennis club membership, and his knockout wife Lizzie, for whom results also mean everything. So it doesn't take a CompuWorld subscriber to see that when Ned's team stops producing--especially now that the magazine's publisher has been sold to a no-nonsense German media conglomerate--the results will be measured in sweat, Valium, slugs of red wine, and alienation of affection. Kennedy knows we know all this, but his hero's engagingly motormouth narration, coupled with the author's knack for magnifying his audience's pandemic low-level anxieties into full-blown paranoia, makes the first half of this cautionary tale--in which a guy with everything going for him loses it all, one excruciating step at a time--intoxicatingly readable, as Ned struggles with the unsavory moral compromises he'll have to make to keep his job, finally steels himself to make them, then gets tossed out anyway. But all Ned's cruelly well-drawn jitters, and every detail of his yuppie crucifixion, are only a prelude to his getting sucked into a new job redolent of sulphur and brimstone--and here, with the pulpy criminal plot loosed from every semblance of reality, Ned's ordeal (cold-calling, bootlicking, money-laundering, serious criminal conspiracy) becomes, if not more predictable, less compellingly so, since you know what he's going through, not because his fears are just like yours, but because you've already read this story so many times. Even so, Kennedy dishes up this familiar fare with enough pizzazz to keep you reading long after you've worked out every single twist two steps ahead of the hapless hero. ($500,000 ad/promo [with The Big Picture]; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ned Allen is a rising star in the ad sales department of an up-and-coming computer magazine based in Manhattan. A sudden buyout by a German firm promises Ned a promotion to the position held by his friend and mentor. But, first, Ned must make some harsh ethical choices, coming close to blackmail, before he can have his dream job. His attempts to do the right thing, save someone else's job, and smooth away the rough spots in his failing marriage land him in deep debt when a counterbuyout renders him jobless. An ill-advised but much-provoked physical attack on his erstwhile German employer renders him virtually unemployable. Ned is saved by an old friend and an attractive job offer that leads him to illegally transporting cash to the Caribbean after he's framed for murder. Kennedy presents an amusing and poignant portrait of what becomes of the downsized: the resumeperfecting, the social dynamics of finessing the reasons for the job loss, and temping as a telephone marketer. He captures the angst and anxiety, looking to "land" (in outplacement parlance) safely on employment terra firma. This is a quick-paced, fascinating look at the cutthroat world of salesmanship and corporate downsizing. Vanessa Bush

Probably most computer industry denizens are salesmen of one kind or anotherAimmensely 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 trueAand 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 elsewhereANed could be any salesman, anywhere, but he's no Willy Loman.
-AElsa Pendleton, Boeing Information Svces., Inc., Ridgecrest, CA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.