FICTION: FINANCIAL THRILLER
Need You Now by James Grippando (Harper)
If you’re going to read James Grippando’s new financial thriller, “Need You Now,” be prepared to scatter bread crumbs. Otherwise, you’ll never find your way back home after wandering through the thicket of aliases, double crosses, back stories and red herrings that litter the narrative path. Indeed, late in the novel, one of the characters resorts to drawing a “plot map” of sorts all over the walls of his one-room New York apartment. Here’s what it looks like:
“Scores of unframed photographs dotted the walls from floor to ceiling, each connected by a thick hand-drawn line. The lines were in various colors — red, blue, green, and yellow — and sometimes more than one colored line connected one photograph to another. … Hand-drawn arrows directed the flow from left to right, from the kitchen, past the window, around the door, and then back to the kitchen — a three-hundred-sixty-degree flowchart of some sort.”
Too bad “Need You Now” isn’t a graphic novel: Having that visual aid to make sense of the swirly-whirly suspense storyline might have helped.
Perplexing plot complications, in and of themselves, don’t spell curtains for a thriller. (Just think of John le Carre, who has perfected the art of bafflement.) But something is amiss when a reasonably bright reader finds herself mentally drifting from the page to mull over questions like, “Wait, was the thug who strangled the banker with razor wire the same thug who strangled the other thug with razor wire?” When a suspense novel raises questions like this, it usually means that the author is generating plot for plot’s sake and that the main characters and the pickles they’ve landed in simply aren’t compelling enough.
Things start out with a sprinkling of promise: A financial mastermind named Abe Cushman (read: Bernie Madoff) has committed suicide by jumping off the balcony of his luxury high-rise in Florida because his $60 billion Ponzi scheme has been exposed. When one of Cushman’s minions decides to high-tail it out of the country before the feds come knocking on his penthouse door, he gets into his sedan only to be strangled by a mysterious assassin hidden in the back seat. Fast-forward three years. At the headquarters of the International Bank of Switzerland on Wall Street, Patrick Lloyd, a young financial analyst who has recently returned from a posting in Singapore, is summoned into the managing director’s sanctum sanctorum. It turns out the higher-ups suspect that Patrick’s former girlfriend, Lilly Scanlon, who also worked for the bank’s offices in Singapore, was in cahoots with the nefarious Cushman and Co. Since the bulk of the billions that Cushman scammed from investors has never been located, Patrick’s bosses eye him with suspicion.
Dazed after getting the third degree from his superiors, Patrick stumbles out into the lunchtime crowds of Wall Street, only to be shoved into the ubiquitous black SUV by an anonymous hoodlum with a message for Patrick’s ex-girlfriend: “Our patience is at an end. It’s time to see the money.” That would be an exceedingly polite message for a ruffian to deliver, except that Patrick is being pistol-whipped as he receives it. Stumbling along the street once more, he is waylaid by none other than Lilly, back from Singapore in disguise and recovering from her own pistol-whipping. (Same thugs? Different thugs? Same pistol? Not clear.) Patrick and Lilly are soon on the run, with bank security, razor-wire-wielding psychopaths and mobsters and FBI agents on their tails.
Grippando raises the paranoia level early in the tale by hinting that Patrick also has some secrets to hide, but even at its best (the first six chapters or so), “Need You Now” is a less-than-middling thriller, overrun with cliché characters and a plot that ultimately has the logic and consistency of a hairball. It turns out that the Abe Cushman character might have had the right idea: Take a flying leap out of this novel before things really begin to get confusing.
