Dead Money

by Jakob Kerr ★★★★★

When Trevor Canon, the polarizing founder of Journy—a fictional tech giant that resembles the love child of Uber and Lime—is found dead, the local police struggle to make progress on cracking the case. As Journy's biggest investor, Hammersmith Ventures (HV) throws their considerable weight around and arranges for the FBI to be brought in, and HV's lead investigator Mackenzie Clyde to be assigned as a special liaison to the case. Her job is to translate the world of Silicon Valley to the FBI agents while also providing detailed daily updates to her boss, Roger Hammersmith. She's paired with an up-and-coming agent, Jameson Danner, and together they start to put the pieces together that help to shed some light on Canon's death.

One of the first pieces they uncover is that Canon updated his will just a week before he died, inserting a "dead money clause" that stated that "in the event Trevor was killed, all of his assets would be frozen...until someone is tried for his murder." That clause points the finger of judgment squarely at the Journy executive team, a diverse group of personalities that all suggest different reasons why someone might have wanted Canon dead. When their first round of interviews turns up plenty of motives, but all suspects seem to have airtight alibis, Danner and Clyde need to dig deeper. As Special Agent Danner says, "When things aren't adding up, it's usually because somebody's lying."

In Mackenzie Clyde, first-time author Jakob Kerr creates a main character who is nuanced, interesting, and determined. He uses flashbacks to establish different portions of Mackenzie's personality, be it her short fuse, sharp tongue, or her burning desire to chart her own course. Her mother taught Mackenzie that "everything in our society, from the smallest thing to the biggest thing, is driven by money." That motivates Mackenzie through her studies and beyond, and fuels her drive for success. "I want to control my own destiny," she says at one point. "I don't want a seat at the table. I want to build my own."

The story has enough misdirection to keep most readers guessing, and Kerr builds a more-than-realistic foundation on which his murder plot can rest. He clearly knows the tech space—his day job is as a lawyer and communications executive for Airbnb—and so the ins and outs of competitive investing in tech, corporate culture in Silicon Valley, and the realities of how tech companies operate all ring especially true as a backdrop for the mystery. While he changes the names—Facebook becomes "StoryBoard", Google becomes "Spyder"—Kerr's made-up world of tech is clearly just reality under a light veneer.

The novel is tightly plotted and far more composed than most debuts; there's little I would change about it. The characters are compelling, the plot moves at a quick clip, and when there is misdirection or a plot twist, it's all done in a believable way. First novels typically have some flaw: plot holes, overwriting, or a failure to leave portions on the cutting room floor, among others. Dead Money has none of those things. It's way more polished than a first novel has any right to be, and it screams for a television or movie adaptation (Paramount TV has acquired the rights). I suspect the world of publishing will be quite insistent after the likely success of this one, and so I'm sorry Airbnb, but Kerr's days in the tech industry may be numbered. Highly recommended.