The Man Who Wouldn't Die

June 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.

July 1, 2019

In Silicon Valley, where everyone has gone nuts over technology, one dinosaur still exists. William Fitzgerald, aka Fitch, is a world-class detective, which is why Tess Donogue turns to him after her father dies. Capt. Don Donogue was an eccentric genius, a technology legend, and Tess claims he was designing a Spirit Box that allows people to send messages after they die. She insists her father is only "deadish" because she's getting messages from him saying his death wasn't an accident. She throws money at Fitch, asking him to investigate. For Fitch, that means asking questions of everyone who seems too interested in the Spirit Box while fighting off a gang called the Tarantulas. When the Tarantulas kidnap Fitch's husband in order to force him to turn over the box, nothing will stand in Fitch's way. There's nonstop action and humor in this over-the-top mockery of Silicon Valley and the pretense that innovation and technology are everything. VERDICT Jewell is the pseudonym for a Pulitzer Prize-winning technology reporter who throws all his knowledge into a funny if sometimes confusing detective novel. Fitch fits the mold of every hard-bitten, world-weary detective who happens to be gay, with a loving six-foot-two husband at home.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2019
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.

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