You're Dead

by Chris Knopf Narrated by Kevin Kenerly

Overview

Organizational psychologist Dr. Waters is a happily solitary guy with a few deep attachments, including to his boss Paresh Rajput, the owner of a thriving hi-tech aerospace company. Until something really bad happens to CEO Rajput, which throws Waters into a lunatic swirl of murderous stalkers, corporate intrigue, amorous female executives, and crafty cops who see the inscrutable psychologist as murder suspect #1.

Waters is hardly defenseless. A weight-lifter and former wrestler, ace poker player and master student of human nature, he takes it all on with surprising strength and determination.

If they only knew. As with the connivers surrounding him, Waters has his own secrets. Autistic as a child, he lives with the consequences-some blessings, others a curse. And a love affair that's hidden even more deeply, or so he thinks.

You're Dead is a mystery/thriller, an adventure story, though in the context of the present zeitgeist the financial stakes of hi-tech ascendancy and flourishing commerce, corporate and personal venality, manipulations by the rich and powerful men and women and the ugly presence of base criminality that crackles around the fringes. It's about troubled and troubling minds, and institutions that struggle to assert relevance, but also how one man, single-minded and apart, can disrupt what the lead detective on the case calls “their clever-clever ways.”

Every writer has their themes and preoccupations. For Knopf, it's the intricacies of the mind, the most complex organism in the universe. The aberrations, as well as the indefinable “normal.” You're Dead is an action-filled examination of what happens when minds of all kinds collide.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 10/15/2018
At the start of this stellar standalone from Knopf (Tango Down and seven other Sam Acquillo mysteries), Dr. Waters, an organizational psychologist for ExciteAble Technologies, a New Haven, Conn., aerospace manufacturing company, comes home one night to find the bloody head of the company’s owner, Paresh Rajput, on a bedroom floor. The New Haven police, for whom Waters has done consulting work, soon gather circumstantial evidence pointing to his guilt. A suspiciously large direct deposit was made from ExciteAble to his account the day of Rajput’s death, of which he claims to know nothing, and the rest of his boss’s body turns up in his rented storage unit. Part of Waters’s job, from which he’s suspended, involved screening prospective employees; now he’s the one under scrutiny. Anonymous death threats against him raise the stakes, as does his discovery that ExciteAble is under investigation for defrauding the federal government. Knopf plays fair as he matches well-developed characters with a crafty whodunit plot, one whose resolution few readers will anticipate. (Dec.)

Kirkus Reviews

2018-11-13

The versatile Knopf (Tango Down, 2017, etc.) kicks off a new series starring a reluctant investigator who's "like the Terminator with an advanced degree."

Not many people recover from childhood autism, but Waters did, more or less. He's so good at reading other poker players' tells that he's been banned from the casinos, and fellow player Paresh Rajput naturally hired him as an organizational psychologist for his firm, ExciteAble Technologies. But he still won't tell anyone his first name, he looks everyone he meets unflinchingly in the eye, and he's taken a married lover, Olivia Lefèvre, who doesn't love him any more than he loves her. Waters' orderly life ends when he comes home from the gym to find Paresh's severed head sitting on the floor of his guest room (the rest of his body will soon turn up in Waters' storage locker). Megan Rajput and Waters' co-workers at ExciteAble all seem above suspicion, but that doesn't matter anyway because DS Noah Shapiro, of the New Haven Police Department, is sure that Waters is his killer. As the evidence against him mounts, so does the danger. The real murderer alternately taunts and threatens Waters over the telephone, arranges for suspiciously large cash transfers from Paresh's bank account to his own, plants firecrackers in the hotel room the crime-scene crew has obliged him to hole up in, sends a burly thug to beat him up, and finally resorts to settling their dispute the good old American way, by shooting at him. Through it all, Waters remains, if not exactly ebullient, then certainly dispassionate as he returns the threats, dodges the firecrackers and bullets, and, fortified by years of wrestling and bodybuilding, turns the tables on the thug en route to exposing a nefarious, if not exactly unexpected, scheme against ExciteAble Technologies.

Finally, a professional-grade detection-cum-actioner with a hero who actually has a logical reason for being so emotionally disengaged. More, please.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173999887
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	12/21/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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