One from Without: A Novel

by Jack Fuller

Overview

A large credit reporting company sees the era of Big Data coming. Its CEO dreams of knowing so much about the people it tracks that it will be able to predict what they will do. With the data, he believes, the company will know people better than they know themselves. Meantime, his chief financial officer has come to the corporate world in order to hide in the numbers on his spreadsheets, trying to escape a dark, ambiguous experience from his past in the CIA. Suddenly a hacker breaks into the company’s consumer database and alters individual files. This threatens not only the company future but its very existence. As senior executives struggle with what to do next, they find out who they really are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609531300
Publisher:	Unbridled Books
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jack Fuller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune journalist and former President of Tribune Publishing, has published several critically acclaimed novels, including Abbeville, as well as books of non-fiction about journalism, most recently What is Happening to News. He has been a legal affairs writer, a war correspondent in Vietnam, a Washington correspondent and a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Debra Moskovits.

Read an Excerpt

Rosten’s windowless office seemed to exist in a time zone all its own. He switched on the autopsy fluorescents. On the desk was a note in Fisherman’s hand telling him to check his safe. He hung his trench coat on the steel rack, turned on the warm desk lamp, extinguished the overheads, and took the coffee pot down to the gents to fill. When he returned, his hands were so unsteady he had trouble measuring out the grind.

He had hung a rendering of Sterling Library on the wall opposite the desk. It seemed askew, so he went to level it. When he did, it seemed tilted the opposite direction. After several attempts, he gave up. It wasn’t the watercolor; it was his eyes.

He opened the safe and found three sets of folders, held together by heavy rubber bands, lying unfiled in the top drawer. The first set contained the usual Slavic and Eastern European names. But the individuals in the second set were different: Farzin Ibrhimi, Hamal Nabiev, Botir Ghazanfar. The material inside their files read like translated verse.

Even when he was just starting to work for Fisherman, the lives of the Russians and Czechs and East Germans had been reasonably familiar. They rose through the ranks of the classless society, ranks not all that different from the ones in which Rosten found himself. Yes, the guideposts along the way were different (Look Left), but that was just a matter of convention.

In contrast, this man from Kyrgyzstan might as well have been a Canto in Chinese characters. None of the others were any less opaque. The men—they were all men—came from the southern Soviet Republics or Afghanistan. Many had Russified names, but from their histories it was clear that they were nothing like the usual Ivans.

The doorknob rattled before Rosten got to the third set.

“So the prodigal has returned,” said Fisherman, more chipper than morning. “You look spent. Perhaps you partied.”

Editorial Reviews

04/25/2016
A major breach in the database of a Chicago financial firm, Day and Domes, occurring while the company is embroiled in critical negotiations to acquire a Silicon Valley firm, has dire consequences in this thrilling topical mystery from Fuller (Abbeville). When the breach is discovered, the members of Day and Domes’s acquisition team set out to determine the identity of the hackers and devise a damage control plan. Top executives—including ruthless CEO Brian Brady Joyce, who supports his musician wife in lavish fashion, and CFO Tom Rosten, a lonely former CIA agent who’s smarting from mistakes he made in the past—must choose whether to cover up or announce the breach and perhaps arrive at a consensus on where to pin responsibility. What follows is an eye-opening portrayal of the fascinating lives and personalities of the key players and of the machinations corporate personnel employ to protect themselves and ensure the completion of the pending acquisition. The sophisticated depictions of human greed and frailty lead to a surprising, yet believable, ending. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A “thrilling topical mystery . . . What follows is an eye-opening portrayal of the fascinating lives and personalities of the key players and of the machinations corporate personnel employ to protect themselves and ensure the completion of the pending acquisition. The sophisticated depictions of human greed and frailty lead to a surprising, yet believable, ending.” —Publishers Weekly

I love "One From Without". To me it’s Jack’s best book since "Convergence". Jack’s experience in corporate board rooms makes this book unmatched in authenticity and the only novel I know which fully deserves the label of “corporate intrigue.” The flashback portion detailing life in the intelligence services are on the level of LeCarre. Beyond that, the writing – and detail – are often flat-out beautiful and the characterizations deep and compelling.This is a book that pulls you in from the start and propels you through the pages. A truly wonderful novel.” –Scott Turow


Selected Praise for previous novels by Jack Fuller:

Convergence

“A brilliant achievement. Like the best work of Greene and Le Carré, it is more than genre fiction; it is literature. . . Convergence is the most plausible and perhaps the best spy novel ever written by an American.”
“What makes Convergence so good” is Fuller’s “ability to convey the ambiguity of relationships, his sense of the complexity of life in a world where facts are open to conflicting interpretations, and his depiction of the in-house duplicity that one assumes goes on the the CIA just as it does in any other large organization.” —Chicago Tribune

“A fast-moving, dramatic, thinking person’s spy novel.” —Newsday

“Slow-burning, elegantly meditative and suspenseful. . .” —London Sunday Times

Fragments

“An elegant, restrained, elegiac novel which succeeds where louder and more insistent works have failed.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Should our children ask about Vietnam, we would not do wrong to place this book in their hands. . . . Fragments should be read by anyone who wants to understand what happened to Americans in Vietnam.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The best novel yet about the Vietnam War. . . . It ranks with Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Jones’s From Here to Eternity.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Although Fuller never resorts to portentous symbolism, he has succeeded in creating a figure of mystic dimensions.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times


Mass

“Fuller’s people, as ever, are convincingly haunted; his urgent prose vibrates with energy.”
—London Sunday Times

“One of the grandmasters. . . . No one is better than Fuller at evoking the ghosts of lost causes, old battlefields, broken faith.” —The Observer (London)

“Fuller has demonstrated his power to produce at an impressively high level of performance. If he keeps this up, his will be a considerable name in the years to come.” —The Washington Post


The Best of Jackson Payne

“The Best of Jackson Payne” will become the standard against which jazz novels are measured. . . . So beautifully imagined, so meticulously informed and so passionately delivered that jazz musicians will nod in approval and writers will shake their heads in envy.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the few novels about jazz to recognize that language may never capture the magic of music but may just evoke the hell out of it.” —Los Angeles Times

Abbeville

“Each segment of the story pulses with the emotion of felt life.” —Booklist

“A resonant, intricate saga.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sweeping and kind-hearted, steeped in the author’s underlying respect for those who choose to rise above the battering ram of unstoppable events.” —Chicago Tribune

“Abbeville is a gentle masterwork.” —January Magazine

From the Publisher