Cash Out

August 13, 2012
In this genial but tepid first novel—a slightly madcap look at the get-rich-quick mentality of Silicon Valley circa 2008—Dan Jordan is about to “cash out” from his lucrative job as a speechwriter for his high-profile CEO. In three days, his stock options will net him over a million bucks; the former journalist who sold out will be able to leave the rat race and chill on the California coast with his wife and two sons. But first, he must deal with the “two little geeks” jeopardizing his future by threatening to make public a number of incriminating documents, including “off the record” e-mails he sent to a reporter exposing his boss as a cutthroat womanizer. If Jordan’s “misdeeds” are exposed before his options vest, he’ll lose everything. And why is a strange man in a blue blazer suddenly threatening our hapless hero? People’s motives generate some suspense, and Bardsley is smart about Silicon Valley culture, but the protagonist is unsympathetic. He tells himself that he’s purer than the greedy, ambitious world he inhabits, but he’s happy to profit from it—and he readily admits that he’s as much of a scumbag as the geeks make him out to be. Most readers will root against him, and with good reason. Agent: David Hale Smith, Inkwell Management.

September 15, 2012
A former reporter turned Silicon Valley speechwriter, Dan Jordan is just days from cashing out $1.1 million in FlowBid stock. The money will enable him to leave a job and a company he despises and build a better life for his family, somewhere on a beach. But as he limps from a doctor's office following a vasectomy, he's abducted by three elfin but enraged IT geeks, who blackmail him. Soon after, a thuggish stranger throws him through a glass door into a supermarket freezer. Both attacks threaten his dream and even his wife and kids. Debut-novelist Bardsley, a former reporter turned Silicon Valley speechwriter, succeeds grandly in making Silicon Valley a place of intrigue and dangerous head cases and hard cases. Even Jordan's neighbors are grotesquely demented and creepily scary. FlowBid is a spectacularly toxic corporate zoo fueled by narcissism, hubris, self-aggrandizement, mendacity, and lack of scruples. A careening plot, plenty of action, outrageous bad guys, an otherworldly milieu, and many laughs make Cash Out a must-read for crime lovers with a taste for the bizarre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)