At First Sight

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Scott Brick turns Cannell's over-the-top and completely stereotypical story into a rousing and endlessly exciting listening experience. Cannell's latest tells the tale of dot-com millionaire Chick Best, a family man who becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman by the pool while on Christmas vacation. There is the spoiled housewife that spends without a care in the world, the drugged-out teenager who couldn't care less about her parents, and the sexy, mysterious stranger who becomes the object of Best's every thought. As familiar as it all sounds, Brick offers a fantastic reading in which he delves so deeply into the character of Chick Best that he almost starts to go crazy himself. The performance is not the least bit overplayed. Brick's uncanny ability to tear words from the page and breathe life into them is almost scary, and the end result is perhaps one of the best commercial thriller audio books in recent memory. A Vanguard Press hardcover (Reviews, May 26). (July) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Cannell steps away from his Shane Scully series and produces what might be his best novel yet. Chick Best is a dot-com millionaire who has fallen on hard times: his money has nearly run out, his lavish lifestyle is in serious jeopardy, and his marriage is, to put it mildly, stagnant. Its getting very hard to maintain his sense of entitlement in a world that doesnt seem to recognize his importance. Then Chick meets Paige Elliswell, he doesnt so much meet her as see her emerging from a hotel pooland promptly falls in love. So he does what any hormone-infested egotist would do: he arranges to meet the object of his affection/obsession, then murders her husband, and . . . well, lets just say thats merely the beginning. The novel is compulsively and stylishly written, with a protagonist who somehow manages to be both sympathetic and loathsome and a plot that is intricate and suspenseful. The novel may remind some readers of Donald Westlakes The Hook (2000) or, perhaps, The Ax (1997), both of which tackle the theme of ordinary men who resort to murder to solve a problem. --David Pitt