The Letter Writer
Robert Mercer Nairne
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 Gritpoul Inc
ISBN: 0974814105

2000 was a very good year in Seattle with the dotcom boom ripe for the plucking.

Millionaires were sprouting up faster than Starbucks coffee shops. House prices were defying gravity. People couldn't get enough expensive stocks. Optimism was rampant, money everywhere, & there was a sense that prosperity would be around indefinitely.

Four families: a preacher, a divorcee, a professor, a restaurateur & a woman with money to burn, receive a copy of The Rich Man's Investment Letter published by David Dulalley, an out-of-work Wall Street analyst, going on retirement age. For the past decade, he has been part of a television station's annual business report, after which subscriptions to his newsletter -- at $200 a pop -- usually doubled. This year, however, he's been dropt from the show, & now he's got to come up with another scheme.

I liked this ambling tale, partly because it takes place in my neck of the woods. Heck, there's even a men's group who drive out to Lake Quinault to further their bonding.

Enter a cast of regional characters with histories & agendas, quite ably sketched, meandering along in a very Northwest fashion... until, in Part II, they embark on the Utopia in a Mexican port, & set sail for Hawaii on David Dulalley's Golden Cruise.

On the high seas, surrounded by luxury & ulterior motives, marriages start cracking at the seams, seductions occur around every corner, & deceit winds its tentacles around the charming & the loathesome, the naive & the lecherous, the suave & the desperate.

The Letter Writer is quite absorbing although a little slow, crowded & unconnected, & a tad heavy on the financial intricacies, however, altogether a lively parable about greed, foolhardy optimism, vanity, the struggle to understand what truly matters, & those not-so-long-ago high times before the crash.
(07/03/05)

Rebecca