Alaska Employment Law

One day not so long ago I was in a bookstore shopping for something else and I saw That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo’s newest book. I have read all of Russo’s books to date, and my thought generally is, when he writes a book, I buy it, period. But candidly, this one wasn’t so good. I might have suspected something because it’s shorter than most Russo tomes. A middle-aged college professor named Jack Griffin, who is returning to Cape Cod – where his Midwestern family used to summer when he was a boy – has to confront the failure of his parents’ marriage, first while only his ailing mother is alive, and then again after her death. His own marriage suffers from this scrutiny: a year later it has disintegrated, and Griffin meets his estranged wife at the wedding of their daughter. Griffin never quite escapes his ghosts, parental and otherwise. The missing year in the story’s narrative seems like authorial laziness, not just a skip in time. Jack Griffin’s interior musings are dull and predictable. I can’t recommend this one; it’s quite devoid of magic.

Risk, by Colin Harrison, is a complete blast. Proving that it ain’t the number of pages, it’s what you put on them, this 192-page thriller features a sympathetic character named George Young, a mild mannered, engaging New York attorney in his 40s who works in the field of insurance fraud for insurance company clients. The widow of the founder of Young’s law firm, knowing she is dying, approaches George in the last months of her life and asks him to find out the circumstances surrounding the violent and bizarre death of her son Roger. Colin Harrison’s depictions of Manhattan are totally spot on, a real strength of the book. Young’s investigation leads him to a Czech hand model (!) named Eliska, who was Roger’s mistress and believes that some of her belongings remain in Roger’s apartment. Eventually, George finds that Roger’s apartment contains several boxes of odd Christmas ornaments. And Eliska has some very strange and scary men interested in her. Near the end of this book I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen, and I was so wrong! The ending knocked me down. Because I was reading Risk on my Kindle, I immediately downloaded another Colin Harrison book. Geez, am I the perfect Kindle customer. But that’s a recommendation!

That other book by Harrison was The Finder, a good read but not quite as strong as Risk, in part because the complex narrative lacks a central defining character. It’s more of an ensemble presentation, Bonfire of the Vanities meets Naked City. Beginning with the hideous murder by sewage of two young Mexican women, The Finder is about a cleaning and document destruction company, controlled by a Chinese woman, Jin Li, and her brother Chen, that engages in very sneaky industrial espionage, largely by failing to shred everything it picks up for the shredder. When Tom Reilly, operating head of a bio-pharmaceutical company called Good Pharma, realizes that his company has been victimized by this scam, he tries to intimidate Jin Li but goes too far. Jin Li goes into hiding, even from her lover Ray Grant, Jr., an ex-NYC firefighter who was inside the World Trade Center when it collapsed. (Barely surviving, Grant, we learn, became a sort of Indiana Jones figure, wandering the world trying to help people deal with natural disasters and other such tragedies.) Chen and his investors, who are used to trading on the inside information Jin Li provides, cannot tolerate her absence, and the search for her is on. Jin Li, fearing for her life, is quite as resourceful as Ray and Chen are dogged trying to find her. Into this mix comes Bill Martz, a billionaire whose hedge fund’s investment in Good Pharma has suffered significant losses due to Chen’s selling. It all comes together nicely, maybe just a bit too nicely, at the end, such that I was wondering if this was the first draft of the screenplay. This is a story that would be a fine movie. Also recommended, but Risk is better.