"30 Seconds" is a wickedly entertaining novel by the godson and namesake of Sam "Momo" Giancana, the notorious Chicago mafia boss, and young Sam's wife, Bettina. These two writers met in the advertising business where Bettina was a sales representative and Sam was an executive. Together they conspired to write an insider's thriller that energizes the imagination.
In 1992, Sam and Chuck Giancana wrote "Double Cross," a whiplash-inducing thriller that spent 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. I predict "30 Seconds" will also find its way to the bestseller's list and cling like a monkey to a treetop.
Somewhere near a sleepy village in a rainforest in Belize 14 men dressed to kill, eased across the jungle floor. In the pitch-black night at the outskirts of the tiny hamlet, they split up. "They waited, the silence excruciating. Then, at the leader's signal, there was a roaring whoosh and the flamethrowers ignited like firecrackers in the night, spitting long trails of fire into the thatched huts . . . It took only a few seconds perhaps 30 and then the village was still and the screams were silenced."
When Chicago crime boss Tony Inglesia rejects an extraordinarily profitable deal to distribute a new drug, his more business-minded colleagues decide it's time for Tony to "retire." An unfortunate problem presents itself when the mobsters cannot find an important computer disk on which Tony stored the secret code to his Swiss bank account. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the old don had sent the disk to his estranged son, who called himself Marty English.
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After breaking with his family's criminal background, Marty carefully cultivated an image meant to convey confidence and he succeeded. As a successful advertising executive in a major firm, he'd risen far beyond his early childhood. Just as Marty is on top of his game something totally unexpected transpires.
Marty is handed the dream assignment: create a winning thirty-spot for Isaac Arrow Pharmaceuticals, the drug giant, in the nation's single greatest game The Super Bowl. There's a catch. Marty has only three weeks to do it. But with both his company and his career on the line, he really doesn't have a choice. Combined with this juicy job comes word that his father has been murdered. A package is left on Marty's doorstep containing a computer disk bearing an indecipherable glyph, the only clue to his father's killer.
Then, the young executive learns that a new tropical drug more powerful than cocaine is about to be unleashed on the public, and that his new star client has become his deadliest nemesis. As Sherlock Holmes would say, "the game is afoot."
The Giancanas take readers on a roller coaster ride from corporate big-city life to the jungles of Belize. All of the characters created for this plausible tale are well drawn and as believable as any I've ever met in a novel. The action and pace left me breathless. In particular the last chapter, with its countdown in seconds, when Marty confronts his greatest foe in a high-tech drama will shatter nerves of steel and electrify the senses.
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(Jones is a published writer & literary critic)
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