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Books: SmasherRick Kaffel spins a tale of Silicon Valley intrigue in new novelby Gary Singh on Nov 11, 2009IN SILICON VALLEY, it isn’t enough to just win. The competition also has to lose, which is why ruthless billionaire CEOs would realistically take such advice from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War when trying to steal someone else’s company. This is just one of three main threads embroidered in Keith Raffel’s new set-in–Silicon Valley thriller, Smasher. Protagonist Ian Michaels, CEO of Accelnet, is going through the usual rows with his board members because the seventh-richest dude in America is scheming to crush his company. At the same time, Michaels’ wife, an attorney, is embattled in her first murder case. On top of that, Ian is also digging up the story of how his deceased great aunt had her scientific discoveries heisted by fellow professors who went on to win the Nobel Prize for discoveries that were actually hers. So you have a ruthless Palo Alto CEO inspired by Zen, washed-up academic frauds milking their tenure at Stanford, plus good old-fashioned lawyer intrigue. And it works. Smasher is a slick-paced, easy-to-read three-dimensional, totally human tale. Raffel himself was a corporate entrepreneur—he founded UpShot Corporation—and he grew up in Palo Alto, where he still lives. In a marketing ploy undoubtedly borrowed from Menlo Park author Barry Eisler, Raffel’s bio puffs that he held a top-secret security clearance to watch over CIA activities while counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Pass a background check, work for the government and then become a novelist. Now that’s Silicon Valley. SMASHER, by Keith Raffel; Midnight Ink; 302 pages; $14.95 paperback. Raffel appears Wednesday (Nov. 11) at 6pm at the Stanford Bookstore, 519 Lausen Mall, Stanford, and on Friday (Nov. 13) at 6pm at the Palo Alto Library, 1213 Newell Road, Palo Alto. by Gary Singh on Nov 11, 2009 |
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