Ben Mezrich

(2022) A card counter on the run from a casino and a just out of prison thief join forces to make sense out of a mysterious object that ties to the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere. Good premise and very readable but it turns into a Dan Brown wannabe novel. Much shorter and more tightly written than any of the Brown drek out there it still depends on coincidence and highly improbable events moving the plot along. Goes from hidden chambers and elevator shafts in the Bunker Hill monument to a confrontation on the USS Constitution. This results in the blowing to literal bits of one of their pursuers by a fake cannon on the Constitution. Thinking this was coming to a conclusion is dashed as the author has in mind a continuing series with our unlikely heros. To be continued (but not by me).KIRKUS: Mezrich, best known as a true-crime author, turns to fiction with this history-based thriller.The novel begins with a prologue that recounts the notorious (and still unsolved) real-life theft of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, then jumps to the present. Math genius Hailey Gordon is paying her way through graduate school at MIT by gambling at the casinos, and she's just been spotted counting cards. Fleeing casino security, she dodges through an open hotel room door�and finds a dead man. Right behind her is Nick Patterson, an ex-convict who's there to meet the now-deceased Jimmy the Lip, who was supposed to be his connection to the deal of a lifetimeÂ¥one connected to the Gardner heist. Hailey's and Nick's mutual desire to elude the cops quickly turns into a partnership to find the real object of the Gardner theftÂ¥which wasn't any of the priceless paintings but an object, as the title suggests, connected to Paul Revere. They're joined (grudgingly) in the hunt by Adrian Jensen, an enormously snobby history professor who's been propelled into a related quest by the murder of a despised colleague. In the mode of the history-based, conspiracy-fed thriller ? la Dan Brown, their race around Boston's historic landmarks takes place in just a day. But it feels like much longer. Thrillers like this one are grounded in research, but in this book the research is dropped in giant blocks that leave the action in park for pages at a time. At one critical point, when a character is about to fire a gun, the action is interrupted by almost 300 words on how to load a flintlock pistolÂ¥a disquisition that does nothing for the plot but bring it to a screeching halt. When the action does struggle to the surface, it's increasingly confusing and often improbable.A conspiracy-driven thriller stalls out on too little action and a dissertation's worth of research.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022ISBN: 978-1-5387-5463-4Page Count: 304Publisher: Grand Central Publishing… (mais)

This "historical fiction" of Musk's takeover and subsequent ruination of Twitter focuses on the events of Nov 2022 - April 2023, as recounted by a few "Tweeps", now fired, and also the author’s imagination. Somehow, despite his alleged "genius", Musk emerges as a petty, thin-skinned dictator who suffered through a miserable childhood and who surrounds himself with yes-men who cater to his inflated ego and rabid need to be liked. Sound familiar? He has no patience for details nor warnings of disaster, and so blunders into losing essential employees and the advertisers who kept the site funded. The book seems hurried and shallow, spiced up with a few juicy stories - sounds like Twitter, doesn't it? Maybe worth a read for the very curious about the how the weaknesses of the world's wealthiest man caused social media's biggest disaster.… (mais)