Smorgasbord Fantasia

Hostile Takeover - Shane Kuhn 's boisterous follow-up to the wildly popular The Intern's Handbook - apes the first book, a first class replica in every sense. Replete with Hollywood action movie cliches and snarky tongue-in-cheek references, our favorite intern John Lago is back to doing what he's best at. Shooting his way through any situation - this time though, he's blazing his way out from a matrimony. And he just might have met his match in his wife, Alice . Back from the dead after that hyper-violent climactic fallout at the climax of the last book ( and their last encounter!), she's a female Lago in every sense - out-thinking and outfoxing our hero in every Machiavellian schemes he draws up. So is Hostile Takeover any good? The concepts are the same old - ripening like pungent French cheese and smelling just as bad. Play the intern to get up close and personal to the top dog and then smoke him/her.  "Our specialty was our cover: the inte...

The Intern's Handbook by Shane Kuhn came to my notice after Mihir from FBC praised the book highly. His recommendations typically are spot-on and I didn't hesitate when I got a deal on this one. So yet another first-person narrative thriller that deals with white-collar assassinations using interns. Aha...After Boy Nobody  (reviewed here  ) I think I see a pattern here. Nevertheless, the cover ( Yo! Creative Genius You!) drew me in and the premise was the perfect hook. Use the non-paid persona non-grata interns - who by the way are worse than dead flies on the wall when it comes to a corporate cultures in NYC chockablock with Ivy league heavyweights fighting for a foot-space - to slowly interject into your corporate honcho targets' office and then finish them off in unsuspecting manners that smack of their most public enemies' signature kill. Yeah. That is what the book is about. The novel actually reads like a bible or a rough field guide for survival for t...