Amazon.com: This tour de force by the author of Manhattan Nocturne is a genre-bending literary thriller that deserves all the pre-publishing buzz it's received. From the prologue, set in the closing days of the Vietnam War, to the denouement 25 years later in the meatpacking district of Manhattan, it crackles with electricity and keeps the reader pinned in place; this is a book that's truly impossible to put down.
Harrison's three protagonists are so well drawn that their individual obsessions rather than his complex plot seem to drive the narrative. Former fighter pilot Charlie Ravich is a wealthy telecommunications CEO desperate to perpetuate his name by any means, including a surrogate mother; his only son is dead and his daughter is infertile. Christina Welles is an Ivy League-educated mathematics whiz who went to prison for her role in a Mafia theft ring. And Rick Bocca, Christina's former lover, is hiding from the mob boss who has arranged Christina's early release to regain the millions he believes she stole from him. Harrison's observations are acute: he can describe the most horrific torture as deftly as he can write a tender love scene. But his ability to weave the separate stories of his main characters together without sacrificing a bit of momentum is truly dazzling; all three of them live in the mind long after the novel's harrowing climax. This is the real "afterburn" of the title, although it may get a second definition if the book makes as rapid an ascent to the top of the bestseller lists as it deserves. --Jane Adams
Product Description:
Power. Seduction. Greed. If you get too close, you might get burned.
A People Page-Turner of the Week
Charlie Ravitch is driven by power. As an international corporate tycoon he's well-skilled in the art of the deal. As a former Vietnam POW he still carries the scars of war. As a husband and father on the hard side of fifty he's on a quest for immortality-- and for a woman who can make every dream come true. No matter what it costs.
Christina Welles is driven by greed. As a prison parolee, she's a veteran of dangerous-- and seductive-- relationships, a cunning woman well-schooled in the art of manipulation. Her bid to stay alive on the streets means outrunning her past, and escaping a lie that threatens every life she touches. No matter what it takes.
In a moment of chance, two lives are about to intersect. In a nightmarish twist of fate, two obsessions are about to be indulged. And in a world where anything goes, one false move can destroy them both...
An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year
Download Description: Charlie Ravich is a survivor whose brutal experience as a POW in Vietnam has more than prepared him for the cutthroat world of global commerce. Now a wealthy Upper East Side executive in his late fifties, Charlie has only one problem: his family is dying out. His wife teeters on the edge of Alzheimer's; their son has succumbed to leukemia; and their daughter, Julia, is unable to bear a child. Charlie is being trumped by time. Enter Christina, a beguiling Columbia University dropout -- intelligent, selectively dishonest, tilted with desire. Her affair with Rick Bocca, a member of a big-time truck-theft ring run by mobster Tony V., has landed her in prison. After four years in Bedford Hills, she is suddenly released by the Manhattan D.A's office -- perhaps because she is innocent, perhaps not. Warned by a detective that Christina is being set up by Tony V., Rick begins a desperate, bungled search to warn Christina, who has lied her way into the high-flying world of Charlie Ravich. But her past catches up with her, and Rick's catches up with him, setting off a harrowing chain of betrayals that leaves only one person with any hope of a future.
The number is in the phone Sorry, Mr. Harrison. Although I do think you write well, I think this book was awful. I will never cease to be amazed at the garbage that passes for plot in the publishing industry these days. You read this book (actually we listened to it on CD for a long drive) waiting for something to happen, for the good guys to outsmart the bad guys, for justice to triumph. But . . . obviously I don't want to give away the ending, but this story is full of extraneous information, gratiuitous male sexual fantasies (i.e. five tracks - that's 15 minutes - of a letter describing sexual proclivities by someone who is not even in the story!) and of course, two episodes of the big "A" sex - what every married man in America doesn't get from his wife, supposedly. Also way too much detailed, unrealistic, sadistic torture (generally when the torturee does what you want him to, you don't interfere with it by torturing him further), and, I could go on . . . The characters often behaved out of character, the depiction of the wife who was supposed to be spiraling into Alzheimer's was completely inconsistent with the actual disorder, while there is such a thing as a spinal nerve, there are many of them, and the author clearly meant the spinal column (but I guess his editor didn't pick that up), and, far worst of all: Cell phones do NOT have dial tones, and THE NUMBER STAYS IN THE PHONE!!! To plot an entire book based upon invented technology (that every 12-year-old is familiar with) is absurd. The S&S people are crazy. This book needed a ton of editing and a whole new ending. I'm really sorry to have to post this negative review, because I understand that work that Mr. Harrison put into writing the book, but I think his editor let him down.
Great book until the end I loved this book until I got to the end. The ending is so dissapointing that I almost regretted taking the time to read the first 450+ pages. Talk about screwing up what could have been a real winner.
Nice Surprise I found this book in a bargain book shop in Auckland, New Zealand and couldn't have enjoyed it any more. The end of the novel does a great job of both pulling together the characters and the plot but also plugging the holes in the story that I initially found unrealistic. The author does an impressive job of building together characters that are indeed multi-dimensional and believable. Few people are truly "good" or universally "bad" and Colin Harrison's main characters are both likable and realistic. The ending was neither dissapointing nor predictable.
New York Noir at its Finest Charlie Ravich is a very successful telecommunicaitons mogul in his late fifties, however he is racked with injuries he got during his time as a POW during the Vietnam war. On a trip to Hong Kong, where he is trying to get a factory built, he witnesses a murder and it winds up making him wealthy, very wealthy. But money won't buy you everything. Or will it. Charlie's son died from leukemia years ago, his wife is slipping away with Alzheimer's and Charlie is obsessed with his pending oblivion. He desperately wants someone to carry on his name. So he advertises for a woman to have his child.
Christina Wells is a pretty young thing just out of the joint, where she spent four years. She's gone to Columbia University, so you know she's smart, but she dropped out to lead the life of a small time grifter. She'd been raped when she was a little girl and it haunts her. Well, maybe she's not so smart, because she spent the fours years behind bars, because she took the rap for her iron-pumping, former boyfriend, Rick Bocca, who somehow found out when she was getting out on a surprise release. It seems that somehow five million went missing from that job she went up for and he wants it back.
This is a well written and well paced story with an ending which doesn't leave you wanting or feeling short-changed. The characters are a little over the top, but Mr. Harrison is such a honeydripper of a writer, who throws people and situations together so well, that we don't care, in fact instead, we revel in his character's excesses. This novel is film noir on the written page and is really, very, very good.
Couldn't put it down. I finished it at 6 a.m., got up at noon and explored the first 20 Amazon reader reviews. Am relieved that so many gave Colin Harrison the on-target swiftkick I think he deserves for this.
I didn't appreciate the author's determination to punish, re-punish, and then re-re-punish Charlie...for what? Vietnam? Yes, I wonder too what vets think of it.
Then of course, Charlie had to be punished (no...TORTURED) some more for his first-time stray into adultery at age 58, and for wanting another child, and for making the $8 million by the death of a Chinese superbillionaire. UNFORGIVABLE. Charlie was apparently a worse person, in the author's judgement, than Tony Verducci who skipped out of the story at the end untouched by any of it - he even got his money back. And of course, no one actually RESPONSIBLE for Vietnam was highlighted and punished. God is often cruel, it seems to us, so when you play God by writing a novel, you outta be nicer than God, not meaner, you silly (expletive deleted).
God at least has a Plan, and strange cases of fairness and retribution in the right corners crop up all the time in real life, courtesy of FATE. Colin Harrison had no plan after all, except to create in order to pointlessly destroy. BUMMER is too good a word for the ending, so is SUCKS; yet it doesn't rate more careful words than those.
Some brilliant reviews here, a handful of incredibly stupid ones by readers who don't know fantastic characterization when it oozes off the pages, but most of you are on the mark far as this reader is concerned. I'll strictly avoid this author hereafter and forevermore. Got to read something better SOON to clear my head of this fine literary atrocity.
As for Mr. Colin Harrison...he'll read our reviews (these writers do read our comments, avidly!) and persuade himself to be proud that he wrenched from us such reactions, even if the reactions are terribly negative. And he'll be kidding himself.
For the record, I am female. For the record, I liked Rick almost as much as Charlie, and hated Christina.
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