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SWITCHBACK is the weirdest book I've read for some time. It looks for much of the book like it's going to be a bog-standard psychological thriller set in the world of Californian high finance. Then suddenly it threatens to go boomeranging off into other genres. Timothy Van Bender is a financial whizz-kid with his own company in Palo Alto. He has a gorgeous house and a beautiful wife. Shame, then, that the company is about to go down the pan. Timothy, you see, has gambled once too often and the Yen going sky-high means he's $24 million down and counting . . . Cue large amounts of ducking and diving as Timothy tries to keep clients and creditors off his back and maintain the pretence that all is well. But it isn't – and it gets worse when his wife Katherine commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. The police start asking far too many questions. And then a woman claiming to be Katherine turns up on Timothy's doorstep, knowing far too much about the couple's secrets. At this point the plot disappears off towards Outer Mongolia. Matthew Klein is a relaxed and assured storyteller and that's what kept me reading through a book with a hero you can't sympathise with (selfish, spoiled rich brat springs to mind) and a plot soaring ever higher on the weirdness scale. The action starts a fair way into the book, but I was hooked by then. Timothy is well-drawn if a slightly understated character and Klein asks a lot of his reader for them to care what happens to him. I can't say I was bothered, but I really did want to know what happened. I'm not sure why SWITCHBACK is set in the late 1990s, unless it's an attempt to portray the financial excesses of the period. But that would still make sense set now. SWITCHBACK is an unusual debut novel, kind of like the Stepford Wives meets Harlan Coben and Joseph Finder. I suspect it will have some readers bouncing it off a wall in irritation. I liked it enough to want to watch out for Klein in the future.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, November 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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