The Job by Douglas Kennedy Little, Brown 387pp, £12.99 in UK
A thriller whose hero sells advertising space for a computer magazine. Fuggedaboutit, you may say, using your mastery of New York vernacular. But Douglas Kennedy has again employed his Big Apple chutzpah, a lot of careful research and, above all, his ability to tell a story that hardly ever slows down from express train speed, to construct another highly entertaining page-turner.
Ned Allen, the latest in Kennedy's line of faintly repulsive heroes, is what you might call a yuppie if that term didn't by now have a whiff of the Eighties about it and that this is a tale totally of the here and now. After the usual small-town beginnings, he has been brought in by a friendly boss and is now the star space salesman of CompuWorld, the third biggest computer magazine in America, with ambitions to become the second biggest. He and his wife live the kind of life where a social triumph is to get a booking at the latest "in" restaurant, where they can spend the evening gawking at the likes of John Kennedy Jnr., Tina Brown, Ralph Lauren and other celebrities, many of whom I must confess I'd never heard of. Allen is, however, living on the edge, one jump ahead of a host of creditors. If he doesn't get paid the hugh Christmas bonus his employers have promised him, his numerous credit cards will be closed down, his membership of the New York Racquets Club, where he plays tennis twice a week at six in the morning, will cease and he will probably also lose his apartment a (what else?) loft in (where else?) a fashionable area downtown.
What's more, his relationship with his PR consultant wife is beginning to get a bit rocky. His macho instincts stop him from communicating his troubles to her and she resents his constant attempts at one-upmanship with their friends. Still, it doesn't stop him from bringing her on a massively expensive Caribbean holiday, which he can't afford. However, we know he's not a bad guy, because he draws the line at blackmail, cheating on said wife and even worse behaviour, which one gathers doesn't cause most of his colleagues a second thought.
Things start to go really wrong when the shadowy Japanese company that owns CompuWorld sells it on to a German corporation and a highly unpleasant new chief executive arrives from Berlin. Though he tells everyone that no changes will be made, it's not long before the nasty Hun is taking our hero aside and telling him he's going to fire his friendly boss and give Allen his job.
At which point it's better to stop outlining a plot that depends on a new twist every few pages and let the reader get on with the book. Suffice it to say that there's a sort of dearth-of-a-salesman middle section and that we then swing into even murkier territory, culminating in one of those nail-biting will-he won't-he last chapters.
High literature, no, high octane, yes. One is already looking forward to the movie.