Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Dead Money: A Novel by Jakob Kerr

  

Jakob Kerr’s impressive debut Dead Money (Bantam, 2025) received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Washington Post, Amazon Editors, and CrimeReads named it one of their Best Books of the Year. And the New York Times called it one of the best thrillers of 2025. My name finally came to the top of the hold list at the library and I had the opportunity to see what generated all of these accolades.

In the first place, Kerr has created an impressively accurate depiction of the Silicon Valley tech world and the people who work in it. The mountain-sized egos, the juvenile mindset, the relentless pursuit of the next technology break-through, the meaningless jargon, and the insatiable drive for more money, it’s all there.

Then, Kerr’s protagonist Mackenzie Clyde is a likeable, hard-working woman who had to start from the ground up in her career. A law school graduate, she doesn’t practice law at Hammersmith Venture Capital, she solves problems when they arise at the companies where her boss Roger Hammersmith has invested. Her role places her outside but adjacent to the tech world, giving her a clear perspective on it and its denizens. She’s had to learn to deal with their immaturity and self-centeredness to do her job and she’s become quite proficient.

The narrative seems to be a straight-forward story about the murder of Trevor Canon, the CEO of Journy, another start-up that’s become a household name overnight, one that is poised to yield millions when it goes public. In addition to the shock of his murder, Canon’s will had a surprising clause that said in the event of Canon’s murder, all of his assets were to be frozen until his murderer was convicted. At first everyone is asking why he thought he might be killed, then the large issue became the locked-down money. Because Canon was the chief shareholder, this asset suspension meant the company was in limbo until the criminal justice process was complete, hence the term “dead money.”

The San Francisco Police had been unable to identify the killer. Canon’s shares were left to the executive managers of Journy, which would make each of them instant multi-millionaires, so they all had motives, making them obvious suspects, but they all had alibis too. The FBI stepped in after SFPD floundered and Roger Hammersmith pulled strings to have Mackenzie added to the investigative team to explain the tech world to the agents. In reality, he wanted to know what was going on.

And here is where the straight-forward part ends. Kerr incorporates more unexpected turns and hairpin curves than a mountain road into the story, with one surprise after another, resulting in a startling but satisfying resolution. Highly recommended.

 

·         Publisher: ‎Bantam

·         Publication date: ‎January 28, 2025

·         Language: ‎English

·         Print length: ‎416 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎0593726707

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-0593726709

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4aaN9Fr

 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2026

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Lesa's Book Critiques: Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon

 Lesa's Book Critiques: Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: A Stillness in Bethlehem by Orania Papazoglou (Jane Haddam)

Hardback Cover

In the spirit of the season, up for consideration today is A Stillness in Bethlehem by Orania Papazoglou writing as Jane Haddam (Bantam, 1992). This is the seventh book in the Gregor Demarkian contemporary mystery series. Demarkian is a retired FBI agent, one who established and led the agency’s profiling department. In his retirement he began consulting with police departments on a volunteer basis but has no official standing or credentials. He has however a significant reputation as an investigator; the references to him in the more sensational news outlets as “the Armenian Hercule Poirot” cause him much angst.

After a high-profile case Demarkian comes home to Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia to find his friend Father Tibor Kasparian dangerously exhausted from his work on behalf of Armenian refugees. Their mutual friend Bennis Hannaford arranges for the three of them to travel to Bethlehem, Vermont, to see the town’s long-running Nativity play and to give Tibor a much-needed break. The tiny rural town has found a way to generate revenue and to lift itself out of genteel poverty, similar to the college students in Rest You Merry by Charlotte MacLeod, who created a profitable Yule celebration. The Christmas pageant is a tourist destination and produces most of the income in Bethlehem, so when Tisha Verek, a recent transplant to the area, decides to file a civil liberties lawsuit against the town to stop the play, nearly everyone is upset. Who was upset enough to shoot her in front of her house, however, is not clear, and the State police wrote the death off as a hunting accident. The fact that a second town resident was killed in much the same manner about the same time and not far away did not rouse the State police’s curiosity, who labelled it another hunting accident.

eBook Cover

The town police chief was not so confident and, when he discovers Gregor Demarkian in his village, he begs Demarkian to review the evidence. When a third victim is claimed during the first night of the pageant under Demarkian’s nose, he feels he has no choice but to find and stop the culprit.

In a lifetime of reading mysteries, the Demarkian series is among my greatest favorites. The plots are often downright devious (see Blood in the Water, for instance), and the people on the pages are powerfully developed and finely nuanced. Father Tibor Kasparian is quite possibly the fictional character I would most like to meet; his apartment stacked high with books of all kinds on every surface inspires equal parts hilarity and envy every time I read about it. The structure of the stories is intriguing: Characters are sketched in a prologue to set the stage for the murders, there’s always more than one, and then their back story unfolds as the book progresses. My only quibble with the series is Demarkian’s astonishing obtuseness in his dealings with Bennis Hannaford, a successful writer of fantasy sagas whom he meets on his first case. Nonetheless, these books are simply not to be missed by any mystery reader, and this title is a fine place to start reading them.

·         Hardcover: 289 pages

·         Publisher: Bantam (November 1, 1992)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0553090240

·         ISBN-13: 978-0553090246

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.