Everything to Lose: A Novel Author: Andrew Gross | Language: English | ISBN:
B00E3CV24Y | Format: EPUB
Everything to Lose: A Novel Description
A determined, (down on her luck,) mother caring for her handicapped son becomes entangled in a murderous conspiracy to keep a twenty year old secret buried in this blistering thriller, set during the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, from Andrew Gross, the New York Times bestselling author of 15 Seconds and No Way Back.
While driving along a suburban back road, Hilary Blum, who's just lost her job and whose deadbeat husband has left her alone to care for her son with Asperger's, witnesses a freakish accident. A car ahead of her careens down a hill and slams into a tree. Stopping to help, she discovers the driver dead—and a satchel stuffed with a half a million dollars.
That money could prevent her family's ruin and keep her special needs son in school. In an instant, this honest, achieving woman who has always done the responsible thing makes a decision that puts her in the center of maelstrom of dark consequences and life-threatening recriminations—a terrifying scheme involving a twenty-year-old murder, an old woman who's life has been washed out to sea, and a powerful figure bent to keep the secret that can destroy him hidden.
With everything to lose, everything she loves, Hilary connects to a determined cop from Staten Island, reeling from the disaster of Sandy, to bring down an enemy who will stop at nothing to keep what that money was meant to silence, still buried.
- Print Length: 336 pages
- Publisher: William Morrow (April 22, 2014)
- Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00E3CV24Y
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,018 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Everything to Lose is the fourth novel that I have read and enjoyed by Andrew Gross. Like “No Way Back,” “Eyes Wide Open” and “15 Seconds” This was an entertaining, quick and intriguing mystery thriller that was full of suspense and kept me engrossed from beginning to end.
In the Acknowledgments Section, the author divulges his sources of inspiration for writing this tale. One was from a man’s confession he read in a newspaper by a man who killed his girlfriend in Staten Island, New York some 20 years earlier. Another was from a 2012 “New York Times Magazine article on the subject of C-U (callous and unemotional) kids. The others were stories from various “New Yorker’s” sharing their experiences during the super storm, Sandy.
The once affluent protagonist, now 36-year-old financially struggling divorcee, Hilary Blum, finds herself under a big black cloud increasing to the level of raging gale storm intensity.
Focused on his new family, Jim is a deadbeat father, providing no aid in raising his and Hilary’s developmentally challenged son, Brandon, born with asperger syndrome.
At a hopelessly low point in her life, Hilary is faced with a morale issue, yet way out of financial ruin. Her difficult decision will impact her life, as well as her family and friends in a way she could never imagine, placing her in the perilous path of a sinister antagonist and his ruthless minions.
In another facet, Deirdre Annemarie O’Byrne was impulsively murdered some 20 years earlier by a psychopathic boyfriend, nicknamed Streak. Her mother and father, Sheila and Tom, had never met Streak and had no idea who he was.
Andrew Gross has written a story that doesn't deliver enough drama or suspense to recommend it to the discerning reader.
The story begins when Hilary Blum witnesses an accident on an isolated country road in which a car flies over the edge of an embankment. When she rushes down to help the driver, she discovers him nearly dead and in the car,she finds a bag full of money..lot's of money. Now is just so happens that Hilary is in need of money as the reader will be reminded of endlessly for the next 50 pages. She decides to toss the money down the cliff and then come back later to recover it.
It takes nearly 70 pages for her to get back to the money satchel and in the interim as mentioned the reader is beaten over the head with all of the financial problems Hilary has to deal with. A son with Aspergers, an ex-husband who is delinquent in child support payments. overdue private school payments, and a recent job loss.
Also, there are occasional "Italicized chapters" which provide some sort of unusual flashbacks involving a murder that took place in the past. Other sidelines include a policeman who is in debt to some bad people and a mysterious man who is told by another to retrieve the cash and another object.
This story meanders too much to keep the reader interested. Hilary seems determined to find out more about the driver who died in the accident so she attends his funeral. The policeman just happens to be the son of the dead driver and the flashbacks are simply confusing and when they all come together at the end, most readers will no longer be interested.
Loads of violence, characters that come and go and some that show up out of nowhere simply to populate the plot don't make the book any more interesting.
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