06/10/2019
The pseudonymous Jewell takes an amusing swipe at the hardboiled detective novel and the world of high tech in his fun debut. PI William “Fitch” Fitzgerald works the mean but incredibly expensive streets of a surreal version of Silicon Valley, where people “Tweep” on “Twipper” and post on “Snipchap.” Tess Donogue, Fitch’s latest client, wants him to look into the death of her father, the tech giant known as Captain Don, who was working on the ultimate next best thing, Virtual Immortality. The Captain was developing a way to download someone’s consciousness into a computer, allowing a person to live on even after that person’s body had crashed. Tess believes he succeeded, since she’s getting Tweeps from her dad suggesting he was murdered. Fitch takes the case and is soon embroiled in a cutthroat world where everyone is out to nab the most important download in human history. Sharp, satirical observations on tech-dependent society and eccentrically comic characters keep the action moving. Jewell is off to a promising start. Agent: Laura Liss, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.)
The Man Who Wouldn’t Die does for Silicon Valley what Carl Hiaasen did for Florida, which is rollicking fun if you’d like your future to be a dystopia of terabytes. I’ll be first in line, or online, or retina scan, to get A.B. Jewell’s next installment.” — Tim Dorsey, New York Times Bestselling Author
“If Philip Marlowe was a standup comic he might sound something like Fitch, the wisecracking, tech-savvy PI in this funny and twisted rejiggering of the classic detective novel. Think Silicon Valley meets The Big Sleep.” — Mark Haskell Smith, author of Blown
“A rambunctious Valley takedown comedy-thriller that lampoons the self-serious preening of the digerati.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“May well set [A.B. Jewell] up as the Carl Hiaasen of Silicon Valley.” — Sam Sifton, New York Times
“Forever Man is Dashiell Hammett 2.0, Raymond Chandler with emojis, James M. Cain after a trip to the Apple Store: The classic hardboiled detective novel, updated for 21st Century Silicon Valley and made hilarious. Even if you’ve read every P.I. novel out there, you’ve never read one like this before.” — Brad Parks, Shamus Award-winning author of Closer Than You Know
“A hard-boiled, hilarious detective novel about Silicon Valley.” — New York Post
“Stuffed with so much invention. … A Hiaasen-esque farce.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Silicon Valley’s next great detective novel (maybe its only one!), The Man Who Wouldn’t Die is hilarious. Get this great read, a perfecto takedown of our self-absorbed land, which is also a perfect summer read.” — Kara Swisher
“The pseudonymous Jewell takes an amusing swipe at the hardboiled detective novel and the world of high tech in his fun debut…. Sharp, satirical observations on tech-dependent society and eccentrically comic characters keep the action moving. Jewell is off to a promising start.” — Publishers Weekly
A rambunctious Valley takedown comedy-thriller that lampoons the self-serious preening of the digerati.
If Philip Marlowe was a standup comic he might sound something like Fitch, the wisecracking, tech-savvy PI in this funny and twisted rejiggering of the classic detective novel. Think Silicon Valley meets The Big Sleep.
A hard-boiled, hilarious detective novel about Silicon Valley.
May well set [A.B. Jewell] up as the Carl Hiaasen of Silicon Valley.
Forever Man is Dashiell Hammett 2.0, Raymond Chandler with emojis, James M. Cain after a trip to the Apple Store: The classic hardboiled detective novel, updated for 21st Century Silicon Valley and made hilarious. Even if you’ve read every P.I. novel out there, you’ve never read one like this before.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Die does for Silicon Valley what Carl Hiaasen did for Florida, which is rollicking fun if you’d like your future to be a dystopia of terabytes. I’ll be first in line, or online, or retina scan, to get A.B. Jewell’s next installment.
Silicon Valley’s next great detective novel (maybe its only one!), The Man Who Wouldn’t Die is hilarious. Get this great read, a perfecto takedown of our self-absorbed land, which is also a perfect summer read.
A rambunctious Valley takedown comedy-thriller that lampoons the self-serious preening of the digerati.
A hard-boiled, hilarious detective novel about Silicon Valley.
Forever Man is Dashiell Hammett 2.0, Raymond Chandler with emojis, James M. Cain after a trip to the Apple Store: The classic hardboiled detective novel, updated for 21st Century Silicon Valley and made hilarious. Even if you’ve read every P.I. novel out there, you’ve never read one like this before.
2019-05-27
A giant of the digital world has died, but his daughter doesn't believe he's dead (text messages from the afterlife feeding her belief), and she turns to a Silicon Valley private eye to uncover the truth.
What follows from that relatively standard premise is a genre version of what the literary critic James Wood has dismissed as the maximalist approach to fiction—books stuffed with so much invention that nary a sentence or plot turn or even a character name can pass by without demanding the reader's soon exhausted appreciative intention. The shamus here, William "Fitch" Fitzgerald, has the genre requirement of being slightly outside of (i.e., better than) the world he winds up immersed in. Amid techies desperate to remain ahead of the next digital curve, Fitch carries a flip phone. His sign of outsider status is less that he's gay (there have been gay detective novels for 40 years now) than that he's married, happily. That is the most original stroke here, a repudiation of the decree that every private eye be a lone wolf. The plot proceeds as most detective fiction does, the sleuth running into a series of characters and, inevitably, danger on the road to ironing out a balled-up plot. But as Fitch goes from character to character, so the book goes from genre to genre: It's a hard-boiled homage; it's a Hiaasen-esque farce; it's a satire of those wacky digital types—none of it believable, all eager to delight, and quickly tiring.
As the time for spring cleaning approaches, the confusion of genres here requires urgent attention.
