Title: Zero Alternative
Author: Luca Pesaro
Published: April 24th 2014 by Three Hares Publishing
Length: 386pgs
Format: ecopy
Genre: Thriller
Shelf: review
Rating:
Blurb:
Hunted.
Betrayed.
Scott Walker is a fugitive from the quicksands of Finance, with one card to play - DeepShare, a silicon oracle coveted by billionaires, hitmen and hackers. As he fights for survival and vengeance, digging deeper into the dark heart of the global economy, one question torments him: what price will the world have to pay?
ZERO ALTERNATIVE is an action-packed conspiracy thriller that plucks at the heart of human nature. When our grip on love, hope and morality starts to slide, the only future worth living is the one we choose for ourselves.
My Review:
Zero Alternative is a thought provoking and intellectually stimulating thriller. It is definitely not a light, easy read, but was intensely intuitive. This novel starts out a bit slowly as Pesaro sets the scene and introduces us to the world in habited by his characters. Pesaro manages to give enough explanation about the world of trading for those of us who have no clue to be able to follow along in the story. At the same time he begins to develop strands of the plot in a subtle way that comes back to the reader later. Also, by flashing back in time to fill the reader in he provides the necessary background information via actual events rather than an information backlog. I also appreciate the date headlines. Both the use of font and the noted passing of time, by the minute, adds to the sense of urgency and foreboding in the novel. Also by giving the date and time without denoting the year Pesaro adds a feeling of the here and now.
The main character in this novel is a very in-your-face type of guy. You definitely can’t ignore him, especially since the author provides you with so many different aspects of his personality. He is definitely a complex (and completely developed) individual.
As a whole this was a chilling novel with dark undertones. It was eerily spooky in its possibility and gripping in the same manner.
About the author:
After spending a few years gaining a degree (LSE) and masters (Bocconi University) in the now mainly discreted pseudo-science that is Economics, he got bored, jumped the gun and became a derivatives trader in financial markets, first with the tragic Lehman Brothers, then with a bunch of other banks, somehow always managing not to blow up. He wrote his first novel in Italian in the mid-nineties, but then decided English worked much better for the type of stuff he liked to read and write, and switched. (Easy to do, he has forgotten most of his written Italian).
Recently he has decided to dedicate himself fully to his great passion since the age of eight – writing, mainly Fiction, but anything that amuses him at any given time. Zero Alternative is his first English novel, and he is hard at work on his second thriller, A Game of Kings.
He is married to the awesome F. and has two children, A. and J. who always manage to annoy, surprise and delight him beyond any reasonable expectation.
No comments:
Post a Comment