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KILLING THE BOSS
by Brian Pinkerton
Writers Club Press: iUniverse.com, March 2001
416 pages
$16.95
ISBN: 0595149871


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Killing the Boss opens with the story of the death of a Douglas Dardis, a vice-president of KitchenWorks, and then flashes back to a scene 6 months earlier, with an invitation from the president of the company to the reception for the new vice-president of sales. The story then unfolds sequentially through transcripts of police interrogations of the employees most closely associated with Dardis, faxes, emails, notes, and memos. We discover how disliked Dardis has been. There are little indications throughout that the police had been called to his home more than once after having gotten 911 calls from his wife.

We see Dardis through the eyes of his underlings: The pregnant secretary who lives in fear of losing her job and who finally loses her baby; the head salesman with a heart condition who has a heart attack in Dardis' office and dies, when his pill bottle is found to be empty; the salesman who is fired for fighting; the recovering alcoholic who falls off the wagon; the cataloguer who is threatened with loss of her position through outsourcing, but is Douglas the man we think he is.

The odd form of this novel has its origins in the epistolatory novel, the tale told completely in letters among the protagonists, mostly used in the early 19th century, by Jane Austen among others, and the late 1930s crime dossier novels of Dennis Wheatley, (probably better known for his works on black magic.) The four titles in the Crime Dossier series, included actual clues, such as ticket stubs and cigarette butts, and invited the reader to solve the crime (I think these were reprinted a few years ago).

It's interesting that the author has chosen to go with iUniverse and Print-on-Demand, which gets a book into print within a few months instead of the 18 months to 2 years it takes for a traditional publisher to release a new title. He also has to do his own promotion for the book. It also appears that iUniverse does not give the author enough editorial assistance. Killing the Boss is almost all characterization for most of its length, and too much plot at the denouement.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, July 2001

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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