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Severance Package: A Novel, by Duane Swierczynski
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Jamie DeBroux's boss has called a special meeting for all "key personnel" at 9:00 a.m. on a hot Saturday in August.
When Jamie arrives, the conference room is stocked with cookies and champagne. His boss smiles and tells his employees, "We're a cover for a branch of the intelligence community. And we're being shut down." Jamie's boss then tells everyone to drink some champagne, and in a few seconds they'll fall asleep---for good. If they refuse, they'll be shot in the head.
Escape is not an option. Jamie's boss has shut down the elevators and rigged the fire towers with chemical bombs. Panic sets in, chaos erupts, and no one is sure whom to trust. Jamie quickly realizes that there's only one way he's ever going to see his family again: the hard way.
Severance Package shows author Duane Swierczynski at his thrilling best.
- Sales Rank: #968052 in Books
- Published on: 2008-05-27
- Released on: 2008-05-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .64" w x 5.50" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 263 pages
About the Author
Duane Swierczynski is the author of The Blonde (St. Martin's Minotaur) and the writer for the monthly Marvel Comics series Cable. He was the editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia City Paper, and almost never wanted to kill his employees.
From Publishers Weekly
At the start of this violent and intense noir and espionage hybrid from Swierczynski (The Blonde), David Murphy, the CEO of a Philadelphia financial company, summons his seven staffers for an important Saturday meeting, where he informs them that the business is being shut down, and that unfortunately he has to kill them all. Every escape route from the 36th-floor office has been sealed off or rigged with lethal sarin gas. Suddenly, mousy Molly Lewis pulls out a gun and puts a slug in Murphy's head. The resulting chaos sets off a panicked scramble, as the reader gradually learns that the business is a front for a covert intelligence group called CI-6. Thousands of miles away in Scotland, two men monitor Molly Lewis, who's actually a highly trained Polish operative named Ania Kuczun, as she performs her own private audition, which involves the systematic elimination of her co-workers using a truly imaginative array of methods. This action fest moves swiftly to its darkly satisfying conclusion. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“[A] kinetic story, which never stops moving...turbocharged entertainment.” ―Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
“Swierczynski writes a brand of thriller whose pacing forces us to reexamine our casual use of the word breakneck...This is essentially one long action scene that begs for the next Tarantino to direct. But if that sounds like faint praise, it isn't: there are both enough cliche killers and comedy to make us raise two thumbs up. If you want your thrillers to be, well, thrilling, pop a big bowl of corn--you won't leave your seat until the end.” ―Booklist
“The best word to describe Swierczynski's latest thriller is frenetic, and even that is likely an understatement.” ―Library Journal
“Fans of crime fiction will find Swierczynski's latest offering to be a guilty pleasure of unparalleled magnitude. With pedal-to-the-metal pacing, characters who appear to be meek cubicle dwellers a la 'Office Space' but are really cold-blooded, black-ops killers, and enough gut-churning violence to make a Quentin Tarantino movie look like a Disney musical replete with singing candlesticks and teapots, the dark, twisted energy in this novel is palpable.” ―The Chicago Tribune
“A hot shot of adrenaline straight to the neural plexus.” ―Joe Schreiber, author of Chasing the Dead and Eat the Dark
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Go out and read all his books as soon as possible. You will not be disappointed.
By Bookreporter
Fans of hard-boiled mysteries have witnessed a rebirth of the genre in recent years. Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime has introduced a new generation of readers to the long-forgotten works of pulp masters, as well as to exciting new writers such as himself and Christa Faust.
At the same time a new generation of excellent writers has reinvigorated the noir genre. Ken Bruen, Jason Starr and Megan Abbott have established themselves as mystery writers we will be enjoying for decades to come. Now add to the list Duane Swierczynski, former editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia City Paper. SEVERANCE PACKAGE is his fourth novel. And if you have not read him yet and you love mysteries and action, you are in for a treat. Swierczynski, like the above mentioned writers, is destined to become a hard-boiled master.
Swierczynski writes noir, but it's far from ordinary. This is noir on steroids, as his books are filled with nonstop action and mayhem. There is not a wasted word in his lean, adrenaline-driven prose. And nobody working the field today can build suspense as well. Read SEVERANCE PACKAGE and you will immediately want to seek out THE BLONDE, his novel from 2006 that was a unique modern reworking of the film noir classic DOA.
SEVERANCE PACKAGE starts with seven employees being called into a Saturday "managers' meeting" of Murphy, Knox and Associations, a somewhat mysterious "financial services" firm located on the 36th floor of a Philly skyscraper. It is a sweltering hot summer day, and the employees react the same way you would at having to get up, get dressed and go into work on a Saturday morning.
It gets worse. They are ushered into a conference room filled with cookies, three cartons of orange juice and four bottles of champagne. So far so good. Then their boss, David, tells them they are on "official lockdown." The phones don't work. Nobody can leave the building since the elevator has been fixed to bypass the floor, and the fire exits have been rigged with sarin gas bombs. Whoa!
They are then told they are being let go from both work and the planet. They have a choice: drink the champagne and orange juice, which is poisoned and will kill them in seconds, or be shot in the head. It turns out that the company is some sort of super secret rogue CIA-type outfit set up to disrupt the bank accounts of terrorists or just about anybody else they feel like messing with. And now the operation is being terminated, so to speak.
This is why noir is great fun. You might think you have a lot of bad days at work. Not like this.
The firm's second-in-command, Molly, then pulls a coup by shooting David in the head, and we are off to the races. It seems the entire 36th floor has cameras all over the place, and Molly is under the impression that she is auditioning for a new job in the super-secret spy agency. And, indeed, events on the floor are being monitored by two mysterious fellows in Edinburgh, Scotland, 3,500 miles away. Who are they?
Swierczynski has propelled us into a noir nightmare where nothing is what it seems and everybody is trapped in hell. Of the seven employees, only one is not a spy or covert op of some sort and is truly innocent. This PR man, Jamie DeBroux, is a former newspaper writer who needed this boring job to support his new child. The writer, in other words, as gullible dupe. There's a twist. Jamie is about to be seriously messed with.
Swierczynski's greatest creation here is Molly, a red-headed killing and torture machine who is so bad she is good. All the current summer crop of cinema fictional superheroes, including Batman himself, would run and hide under the bed if they ever met Molly. Think of Linda Fiorentino from The Last Seduction and imagine her being a million times more ruthless and violent. That's Molly.
But Molly, who may not be who she claims either, has a soft side. She is, after all, trying to provide for her ailing mother and ventures to the dark side out of unrequited love and a desire never to be a victim again. She's nuts, but a hell of a woman.
And she never loses control. Nor will she ever give up. But still, she finds time in the middle of a small war to stop and fix her hair. "The pain didn't matter though. Her appearance did," Swierczynski writes. After all, on job interviews: "A battered face would not impress her employers." You should not root for her, but you do. Molly is the ultimate guilty pleasure.
SEVERANCE PACKAGE is not for the squeamish. People are hung upside down out of 36th story windows. Others get sarin gas blasts to the face. Some suffer bullets to the head and other body parts or are attacked with razor blades, pix axes, saps, you name it. The blood flows. And yet, somehow the strongest manage to survive and fight on, at least for awhile. If you like action, you will love this book. It is a wild ride but also a fun read that keeps pages flying past.
Swierczynski is great at keeping the suspense building to a boil. Readers have no idea how this story will end. It is not clichéd. And in true noir fashion, he provides twists galore that will keep you guessing even beyond the last page. In his nightmare world, people fight and die, even if they don't know exactly why or for whom. Few are truly innocent, and heaven help those who are.
Noir was born in a time of uncertainly in the mid-20th century. Now we live in another uncertain time in a new century and noir is back, thrilling us with its bleak vision. Swierczynski is one of the up-and-coming stars of the mystery world. Go out and read all his books as soon as possible. You will not be disappointed.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Fast, Furious, Crazy Fun!!!
By Don In Fremont
The world has been waiting (well, MY world anyway) for Duane Swierczynski's follow-up to the 2006 standout The Blonde for a long damn time, and it's finally here, in the form of Severance Package. Was it worth the wait?
Oh, yeah.
Severance Package is a rocket-fueled story of spy vs. spy, and then some, spanning continents as well as consciousness.
It opens with a fairly incidental death by potato salad. Really good, we're told, potato salad. From that point, the story gets unusual.
Right away we are thrust into the world of Murphy & Knox, a financial consultation firm run by one David Murphy. He's called a meeting for Saturday morning. As you can learn from the book flap, Murphy then informs his underlings that the company is, in fact, a front for an intelligence operation, and due to circumstances, it's become necessary for them all to die. He's been kind enough to provide Big Sleep-y time mimosas, or take a bullet in the head. Very considerate.
What Swierczynski has done here, with amazing skill, is create a multi-focused narrative of terror and laughs. The violence is by turns stunning and hilarious, the characters become our friends and we feel for every single one of them as they take their various routes to, well, wherever. It's these characterizations that elevates Severance Package beyond what it could have easily been--a set-piece extravaganza designed for commerce. Even the secondary characters are fully-formed, giving full weight to the proceedings.
If there's a nominal hero, it's Jamie DeBroux, the writer of the group. (Hmm.) He's our everyman, deposited by a playful God into some kind of apocalypse, when all he wants to do is get home to his family. Swierczynski has done a great job of letting us share his view, filtered by shock, then fear, then a comic determination, of the world exploding around him.
But Severance Package is RULED by Molly Lewis. Assistant to David Murphy, she promptly turns the operation on its axis, and from that point, becomes a character of such grit and playful brutality that you'll find yourself becoming her cheerleader. Her action scenes in Severance Package are as entertaining as you will find in a thriller this year. Swierczynski does an amazing job of giving us a visual field of events, as well as keeping up the funny. Needless to say, Severance Package would make one outrageous movie, but they can't really duplicate the outsized dynamics that Duane Swierczynski creates with the voice of his own narrative.
There is stuff in this book that I SO MUCH want to talk about, but I can't, so just dive in and bring your freakin' kevlar!!
Yeah, definitely worth the wait.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Bad day at the office
By D. Sturm
"His name was Paul Lewis and he didn't know he had seven minutes to live." With that, the gates fly open and "Severence Package" is off and running. Within pages, we're treated to a death by potato salad. Then, the last words a dying man hears from his wife is, "Well, this is ahead of schedule." And that's just the first six pages.
Whoa, Nelly!
Nearly all the action in this book happens on the 37th floor of an office building in downtown Philadelphia and it happens over a period of about four hours. That's also about the time it takes to read the book. I read it in one sitting on a Sunday afternoon.
This noir at its pulpiest. Or maybe pulp at its noirist. Other writers here have summarized the plot, so I won't bother. But realize up front that you have to suspend an elephant-sized amount of disbelief. Feats are performed that are hardly humanly possible. People survive despite incredible amounts of damage being inflicted on them. There is torture, mutilation, amputation and a guy gets a cookie crumbled into his mouth (very funny scene).
Want characterization? Don't bother. Want emotion? There's only one -- rage. Want cold, hard logic? Not here.
Want over the top action? In spades. Some posters have compared this to the movie "Three Days of the Condor." Not so much. Think more the machine-gun-leg part of "Planet Terror." But less tasteful.
Then there's Molly Lewis. She's one thing with a gun. Another with an Exacta knife. And still more with the unscrewed cutting arm of a paper trimmer.
And I'm not even going into the woman who pulls the trigger of a gun with her tongue because she can't use her hands.
Terrific cover and b&w illustrations inside.
And any author with a redneck first name and a Polish last name is OK in my book.
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