The Shadow Box

Michael Fallon has it all. A rising star in a Wall Street firm, he is surrounded by devoted friends and family, and the most beautiful woman he's ever met has just agreed to marry him. Then, in a single violent instant, everything changes.
It begins with the senseless murder of his uncle Jake - the powerful and mysterious man who raised him - during an apparent burglary attempt. Then, days after losing the man he idolized, a chance shotgun blast takes the life of his fiancee during a convenience store hold-up. Michael's high-powered job is the next casualty, when he's fired with no explanation, then black-balled by all of Wall Street.
But the force that seems determined to destroy him isn't finished. Men he doesn't know seem to want his life as well. Telling no one where he has gone, Michael Fallon hopes to start over on Martha's Vineyard. He begins to think a new life is possible.
But soon Michael will realize that for the last of the Fallons, there is no sanctuary. He will learn that his entire life is built on lies. Suddenly he knows that nothing is random and escape was never an option. And now the only hope left is to stand and fight.

Maxim's crackjack thriller inaugurates not only Avon's new hardcover line but also a fresh direction for the author, who here abandons his usual spy-vs.-spy milieu (Bannerman's Law, etc.) to highlight the terrifying dimensions of the manufacture and international trade in counterfeit prescription drugs. The hook is classic: a man watches his life stolen from him as he learns that everything he once assumed true is false. The set-upon hero is Manhattan investment banker Mike Fallon, whose Uncle Jake?not quite a gangster, not quite a saint?is beaten to death with a baseball bat. Then Mike's fiancee is killed in a convenience store holdup; and he is fired from his job. Mike begins to feel that New York is out to get him, especially after he's nearly pushed in front of a subway car and then is assaulted by a pair of muggers. Close to panic, he flees to Martha's Vineyard, where he attempts to begin a new life and is drawn to Megan Cole, a psychic with a troubled past. But those New York attacks weren't random; behind them looms a shadow out of the Fallon past, a man who is tied to both Mike's dead father and to the murdered Jake. When one of the muggers turns out to be connected to Mike's old employer, Mike's lawyer joins up with Jake's former bodyguard and his underworld associates to try to uncover the truth. It's a complicated storyline that Maxim plays out with skill, boosting the narration with fluid writing and well-drawn characters. He also reveals enough frightening details about the drug business to scare readers off prescriptions for the rest of their lives. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Maxim (Time Out of Mind, 1986, etc.) forsakes the astral plane for a suspenser whose down-and-dirty plot turns on the megabuck traffic in bogus prescription drugs. Michael Fallon's charmed life suddenly goes badly wrong. His beloved uncle Jake (a political fixer with connections throughout New York City) is brutally murdered, and his fianc‚e is gunned down in a botched convenience-store robbery. Shortly thereafter, Michael is fired by the Wall Street investment firm that pays him big money to analyze the pharmaceuticals stocks, and he's assaulted on a well-lit Manhattan street. Convinced someone wants him dead as well as discredited, he goes to ground in off-season Martha's Vineyard. Back in the Big Apple, Brendan Doyle, a godfatherly lawyer, is digging into the death of his old pal Jake and the real cause of Michael's dismissal--an inquiry that eventually leads to Baron Franz Gerhard Rast von Scharnhorst, an ostensibly respectable German industrialist whom Jake, years before, had forced to flee the US. The powerful head of AdlerChemiker AG, a Munich-based multinational that, among other dubious achievements, has gained working control of the lucrative global trade in counterfeit drugs, Baron Franz is mounting a belated vendetta. While young Michael's friends and foes stalk one another, he falls in love with Megan Cole (a year-round island resident with a past), buys a guest house in Edgartown, and finally discloses his whereabouts to Doyle. The body count climbs, and heavies in the pay of the vindictive baron fall to Michael & Co. in a climactic clash. With astute assistance from Doyle, the last of the Fallons is then able to settle outstanding accounts with AdChem and its hirelings; at the close, he lights out after Megan, who needs to be convinced they have a future together. A slick, engrossing entertainment with plausibly motivated characters and chilling detail on an underground enterprise that's evidently as remunerative as narcotics. (First printing of 50,000) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Wall Street hotshot Michael Fallon's life is falling apart. First, his uncle Jake, a shadowy political fixer, is brutally murdered; then his girlfriend is killed during a convenience-store holdup; then two thugs try to mug him; finally, a drunk pushes him in front of a subway train, breaking his arm. While Michael flees to Martha's Vineyard, his attorney and his uncle's bodyguard begin to investigate this bizarre chain of events. They discover an old enemy of the Fallon family who, in a new identity, has risen to the chairmanship of a pharmaceutical company called Ad-Chem, whose enormous profits stem, in large measure, from its practices of dealing in counterfeit and cut-rate, chemically deficient drugs. It all adds up to a confrontation if Michael is to reclaim his life. This is a thoroughly entertaining novel, an effective thriller yet reminiscent in its breeziness of the best of Donald Westlake. It also presents a surprisingly convincing indictment of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. George Needham