Title: Jenga Point
Author: Stewart Newton
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
ISBN: 978-1-52463-186-4
Pages: 192
Genre: Thriller
Reviewed by: Joe Kilgore
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There is a lot to like in Stewart Newton’s modern thriller, Jenga Point. The author taps into the mindset of contemporary young people in England. He exploits ever-present terrorism concerns. He gives interesting insights into the legal mazes that must be mastered to prevail in international prosecutions. He even details the minutia that goes into the best of police procedurals. The only snag is that one gets the feeling he’s constructed two tonally different books rather than a singular cohesive one. Both are involving and have merit. It’s just that their coupling isn’t as cohesive as it might have been.
The novel begins in Manchester, where the reader is swept into the psyche of David Richmond, a young man living on the edge and surviving by purveying cocaine and other illicit pharmaceuticals to university students who fund their partying via college loans they never intend to fully pay back. Here, the mood is tense, the prose is clipped, and you can’t help but be engulfed into David’s world of drug dealing, theft, and petty larceny. Yes, he’s a bad guy doing bad things but he’s also interesting, energetic, and involving. You actually pull for him when he meets Laura, a young college lovely whom he wants to impress. Their dinner at a chic restaurant reveals he’s playing above his social station but you empathize with his desire to move into the mainstream. Soon thereafter, his dealer and fence, Dino, gets him involved with Turkish gangsters who promise a huge payoff if their money- laundering scheme is successful and a particularly painful death if it isn’t. As you might expect, things go wrong, everybody’s either killed or caught, and all of a sudden, one book stylistically ends and another begins.
To be fair, the author has set up the reader to believe one thing initially which is later revealed to be something else entirely. However, the frenetic pace of events heretofore mentioned is now replaced by the introduction of multiple police, prosecutorial, national and international characters that add to authenticity but subtract from energy. These numerous players take over in the second half of the book—rightly so, as they are the ones who hold the key to what happens to David, Laura, and Dino. But the myriad of machinations involved in determining the fate of the initial three principals slows both action and excitement. Fortunately, the trio returns to prominence before the novel’s end as the fate of each plays out exuberantly.
Newton is a first rate writer whose vocabulary, quick wit, and use of irony make Jenga Point a worthwhile read. If he masters the art of consistency in future works, he’s likely to become quite a highly regarded author.
