By Jakob Kerr
Days before someone shoots him to death, Trevor Canon, the founder of the San Francisco startup Journy, amends his will to freeze his assets in the event of his murder. That’s the proximate story of DEAD MONEY (Bantam, 407 pp., $30), Kerr’s terrific debut, which appears to be a traditional whodunit but is really an unpredictable nesting-box of surprises.
Who’s keeping secrets, and to what end? Why is Journy, a revolutionary “mobility platform,” with the irritating motto “It’s not the destination — it’s the Journy,” such a big deal? Mackenzie Clyde, whose venture capital firm invested $5.2 billion in the company, is ordered by her boss to help the F.B.I. investigate Canon’s death. The case takes them, among other places, to the home of a would-be entrepreneur babbling about “inner creators” and “mindful irrationality” (luckily, Mackenzie is an expert at “autopiloting through a conversation”).
They also visit the prestigious courtside-seat area at a Warriors basketball game, where Mackenzie “couldn’t find a single man who appeared to be wearing socks”; and, hilariously, Burning Man, where tech bros whacked out on psychedelics cavort around in unicorn, astronaut and sandworm costumes.
Kerr, who worked at Airbnb for a decade, brings an insider’s knowledge and a satirist’s sensibility to the vanities and delusions of Silicon Valley. Describing Canon’s decision to pay for his $9 million house in cash, he observes that “tech founders would sooner use Windows than be saddled with something as banal as a mortgage.”
Mackenzie — 6-foot-2, full of secrets, constantly underestimated — is the most interesting character of all, her surprising back story unfolding in a series of interstitial chapters. “You’re tall,” men tend to blurt when they meet her. “Taller than you,” she always responds.
By Ande Pliego
It’s a premise as old as time — or at least as old as the 1939 Agatha Christie classic “And Then There Were None”: A group of strangers stranded on an island are murdered, one after the other. Pliego’s new homage, YOU ARE FATALLY INVITED (Bantam, 371 pp., $30), lures a crew of thriller writers to what is billed as a “themed writers retreat” at the island mansion of J.R. Alastor, a best-selling but reclusive author.
Just like Christie’s shadowy puppet master, the delightfully named U.N. Owen, Mr. Alastor (whoever he is) isn’t there to greet the guests. But he’s ordered them to solve a series of creepy puzzles. “I would encourage you to come up with an answer,” Mila, who has been hired to orchestrate the weekend, says. “Mr. Alastor believes in consequences for poor effort.”
The writers are vain, bitchy, competitive and insecure. They’re also harboring guilty secrets that seem to deserve fitting punishments. As Thomas Fletcher, who specializes in literary mysteries, notes: “Every one of us kills people for a living.”
Pliego has great fun with her (occasionally overcomplicated) material. It’s clear that more than one person with murderous intent is roaming around the island hellscape. It’s also clear that the characters are in on the joke, such as it is. As one says, “Irony wasn’t just misting across the dinner table — the entire island was soaked in it.”
By Alison Gaylin
Gaylin’s clean prose and controlled narrative voice bring an all-too-realistic chill to WE ARE WATCHING (Morrow, 324 pp., $30), a book that begins with a domestic cataclysm. Meg and Justin Russo, who own a lovely bookstore in the Hudson Valley, are driving their daughter to college when they see a group of men glaring menacingly and photographing them from a nearby Mazda. Meg loses control of the car, and Justin is killed.
What comes later is just as troubling. The creepy, staring visitors who come to the bookstore ranting about a “secret chamber” and claiming to “know what you do in there.” Online chatter about the predictions supposedly hidden in “The Prophesy,” a long-out-of-print fantasy novel that Meg wrote as teenager. Repeated references to the number 121222.
All this appears to have something to do with Meg’s father, a musician who in the 1970s was part of a heavy-metal band with a cult following. Now he’s a paranoid recluse — raving about antisemites, the pharmaceutical industry, religious zealots and cabals of people who hate rock music and are out to get him. The more Meg learns about the troubling events from his past, though, the more she thinks he might have a point.
The book shows how social media can disseminate crazy ideas that tip into real-life violence. But if it makes you think of “Pizzagate” — the 2016 right-wing conspiracy theory accusing Democrats of running a child sex-trafficking ring from a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that caused a believer to open fire with an assault rifle in the restaurant — it might also bring to mind the paranoiac claustrophobia of “Rosemary’s Baby.”
Who can Meg trust, and who will betray her? A tip: Watch out for people with missing fingers.