Title: Walk A Thin Wire
Author: Gordon N. McIntosh
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 978-1663217301
Pages: 237
Genre: Fiction / Thriller / Mystery
Reviewed by: Jake Bishop
Pacific Book Review
Big business is bad business in this involving contemporary thriller from author Gordon N. McIntosh. Interestingly, the protagonist is not another globe-trotting secret agent nor a down-on-his-heels private detective. Rather, he’s a commercial real estate developer who is planning to oversee a new headquarters building for Lawrence Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company who was formerly the darling of investors, but who is currently awash in bad press and product recalls. Doug Sutherland, the aforementioned
developer, is also the committed lover of Kelly Matthews, who just happens to be the brand new legal-council for the beleaguered corporation – a job she obtained after an initial introduction from Doug to the company’s founder, Dr. Jorge Castillo. As the story begins to unwind, Castillo’s company has even more negative baggage it wants to keep hidden, Kelly wonders what she’s gotten herself into and attempts to find out, and Doug is not only in danger of losing a big real estate deal but also his and Kelly’s life.
Much of the previously detailed narrative is tangentially related to Doug’s friendship with Sam Baskin, a seventy-four-year-old investigative reporter who’s deeply involved in digging up dirt on Lawrence Labs. Walking together through the streets of Chicago, Doug is on scene when an attempt is made on Sam’s life. The senior scribe suffers a gunshot wound and Doug is drawn into the seething cauldron of vengeful folk from multiple occupations who were once targets of Sam’s soirees into fact finding. Before he knows it, Doug is himself taking up weapons to avenge a friend and keep himself and Kelly out of harm’s way, yet harm, however, has a way of expanding exponentially. Soon, criminal corporate types, gamblers, drug runners, hit men and more are making life unbearable. Doug is forced to walk that thin line between doing what he has to do without becoming what he doesn’t want to become.
In addition to writing a suspenseful tale and filling it with characters who seem like people we know – also people we definitely don’t want to know – McIntosh manages to do a first-rate job of turning Chicago itself into one of the supporting players. His inherent knowledge of the city’s neighborhoods, it’s watering holes, the tourist’s attractions and its natives’ oases become at once both real and larger than life. While The Windy City is far from the only locale in McIntosh’s crime chronicle, he’s made it one that epitomizes what poet Carl Sandburg called “City of the Big Shoulders.”
If you like your novels balanced between intellect, excitement, and moral choices that have to be made one way or the other, you’ll definitely like Walk A Thin Wire.
