Audiobook: "Death Benefits" by Thomas Perry

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fans of Thomas Perry's popular series featuring Jane Whitefield, the Seneca Indian woman who helps people disappear (The Face-Changers, Shadow Woman, et al.) may be disappointed when they discover that Death Benefits doesn't feature the heroine who has won this writer so many new readers. But the disappointment won't last longer than the first page of this intriguing and extremely well-written new thriller, whose hero, John Walker, a data analyst for a large insurance company, deserves a series of his own.

When a security man named Max Stillman plucks Walker out of the office pool and dragoons him into investigating a fraud against the McClaren Life and Casualty, Walker's previously safe life takes a new and potentially dangerous turn. As the pair begin searching for the missing employee, who signed off on the huge (and phony) payoff of a death claim, and follow her to a grave in a Midwestern wheat field, Walker discovers talents he never knew he had and a thirst for vengeance. With the mysterious Stillman, he tracks the conspirators to a New Hampshire village and an explosive and shocking conclusion to a fraud that's much older than either of the men might have guessed. Like Don Winslow, whose California Fire and Life also focused on insurance fraud, Perry manages to make even the dusty back corners of the corporate world a likely setting for mystery and mayhem. This is a sharp, suspenseful, successful debut for a pair of unlikely compatriots, marked by Perry's edgy, noirish style, lively dialogue, and superb pacing. --Jane Adams --

From Publishers Weekly

Perry (Blood Money; The Face Changers) serves up a clever entertainment (in the Graham Greene sense of the word) set in the high-stakes insurance world. After a deliberately ambiguous prologue (just why is Ellen Snyder going to an L.A. airport hotel before dawn?), we learn that Ellen, working out of the Pasadena office of a prestigious San Francisco insurance company called McClaren's, recently authorized a 12$- million death benefit payment to a man who turned out to be an imposter. Now both the imposter and Ellen have navished, and McClaren's has called in mysterious operative Max Stillman to investigate the apparent conspiracy to defraud. Stillman oh-so-deftly draws young John Walker, an analyst in the main San Francisco office, into the investigation. Walker cooperates with Stillman because he doesn't believe Ellens's guilty; he's still a little bit in love with her from their training class days, although Ellen's career plans left no room for more than a casual interoffice romance. Casual is the operative word here: a casual remark from Walker to an enigmatic computer hacker named Serena leads to a seriously steamy interlude. And casual is the best way to describe Perry's seemingly effortless method of developing character and building suspense. His style is so assured as to be invisible, seamlessly supplying plot and character information as the chase leads from California to Chicago, Miami and finally a small town in New Hampshire. Though the finale echoes the premise of a particular Dachiell Hammett story, everything else feels as fresh as dawn. (Jan. 16) Forecast: Perry won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy, and Metzger's Dog was New York Times Notable Book of the Year. This is his finest novel yet and, if sold with enthusiasm, could chart significant numbers. The bold evocative, b&w jacket will help, as will the four-city author tour.
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