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Loading... Due Diligenceby Michael A. Kahn
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Belongs to SeriesRachel Gold (4)
"Quite definitely addictive . . . a must-read, written with wit and humor and peopled with multidimensional characters. What more could a reader ask for?" --Mary Balogh, New York Timesbestselling author The phone call Rachel Gold received from a nervous CPA almost seemed routine. Rosenthal wanted to meet with her to discuss something confidential about a corporate merger. Hardly an unusual request of a lawyer. But Rosenthal never made it to the meeting--and when his corpse is discovered, it was clear he had died under circumstances too bizarre to believe. Having never even met the murdered CPA, Rachel is willing to let the police try to close the case. But that all changes with the next victim--someone so dear to Rachel that the hunt for the killer becomes her personal vendetta. What lethal facts did the slain accountant find buried in the books of Armstrong Bioproducts while doing the pre-merger due diligence? Was there any connection between that pharmaceutical company and the presidential campaign of Rachel's political hero, Dr. Douglas Armstrong? Armstrong, the founder of Armstrong Bioproducts, is now the junior senator from Missouri. And what was the significance, if any, of the yellowed typewritten lists of names of residents of two St. Louis nursing homes that had gone out of business decades earlier? Teaming up again with her best friend, Benny Goldberg, Rachel seeks her own measure of vengeance. As other corpses show up, her pursuit will take her from the upper strata of St. Louis society to the elaborate network of limestone caves far beneath the streets of St. Louis, where the answers to the mystery--along with the murderers themselves--await her arrival. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The plot revolves around an accountant who was doing due diligence on a company before a merger could take place. Rachel had received a call from him explaining he needed her advice on some details of the merger. When his body is found in the basement having gone through a trash compactor, Rachel is hired to help clean up some of the affairs and discovers an intricate web of deceit and malfeasance. Soon her investigation leads to a presidential candidate and what he might have done many decades earlier and whether doing something that might benefit millions of people but leads to the deaths of some elderly patients might be ethically suspect.
Each of Kahn’s books takes a legal issue and builds a plot around it. There’s usually some kind of list with obscure combinations of letters and numbers Rachel must decipher. While the details of the characters appear repetitive from one book to the next, I didn’t find that as disconcerting as have some readers.
Some interesting history of trademarks. I knew little of their origin and raison d’etre. “During medieval times, trademarks became a symbol of responsibility as the powerful guilds of Europe required their members to each use a unique mark. That way a defective product could be traced back to its maker. A trademark was thus the highly personal symbol of a single worker: when his life ended, so did his trademark. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, it had metamorphosed into the multibillion dollar world of brand-name marketing—a world where a single word, such as Xerox or Corvette or Chanel or Kodak, can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Not to mention that St. Louis became home to many brands of beers because it’s built over the top of hundreds of limestone caves. I just had to check out whether all this was a figment of Kahn’s imagination. It is not and the caves play a central role in the solution to the puzzle. Note that claustrophobic activities appear in other of Kahn’s novels. (http://books.google.com/books?id=A-qxHKZcF_AC&pg=PR6&dq=st.+louis+caves&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_mNCVKejOs3-yQSCyYCQCg&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=st.%20louis%20caves&f=false) ( )