Aug 8, 2013

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Davina & Paul Witts - Founders

Below is part of BookBrowse's review of The Summer of Dead Toys. Read the review in full here

The Summer of Dead Toys: An Inspector Salgado Thriller
by Antonio Hill

Hardcover (Jun 2013), 368 pages.

Publisher: Crown
ISBN 9780770435875

BookBrowse Rating:
Critics' Consensus:


Review:
Like the titillating glimmer in the eye of a handsome stranger, a book that makes me laugh on its first page promises pleasures untold. I've been known to be a sucker for both. What's more I've also been known to swoon over well crafted, flawed, quirky or wicked-smart protagonists. And Antonio Hill's Inspector Hector Salgado - in The Summer of Dead Toys - is all of these rolled into one.

That he's handsome is something I'm taking on faith in the one woman he beds, a woman whom maybe he shouldn't have. And the titillating glimmer? It comes from depth of character. His is born of sadness over a marriage broken up because...well, he's not entirely certain why his wife Ruth left him. She's got custody of his son Guillermo and Hector grieves this loss perhaps more than the shattered marriage. This is one of many life events that have humbled him; made him able, if not to laugh at himself, to at least not take himself too seriously.

On the other hand he takes his job, as a Barcelona police homicide detective, very seriously. Maybe too seriously. Or not enough, depending on one's point of view. Which explains why the transplanted Argentine has just come back to work after a mandatory time out. It seems he lost it while interviewing a suspect, a Dr. Omar, in a sex trafficking ring. A young Nigerian girl - a child, really - who had been brought illegally into Spain, fatally mutilated herself rather than become a sex slave. As Salgado was interviewing this Dr Omar his anger superseded good judgment and professionalism and he beat the scumbag within an inch of his slimy life. Although everyone in the department, especially Salgado's boss Superintendent Savall, sympathized, it was determined that he still needed time to reflect on his anger management skills. So now he's back to work but must bare his soul to a department shrink. I needn't add that the thing with the shrink, who Salgado misjudges to be just a little older than Guillermo, isn't going to work out well.

So now Saldago's back at work and Savall puts him on an open-and-shut case. A young man, Marc Castells Vidal, scion of a well-connected family, got drunk while celebrating San Juan and took a fatal fall from his bedroom window. No foul play was suspected but the boy's mother insists they, at least, go though the motions of an investigation. From all appearances this is a way to keep Salgado occupied while his former partner Sgt. Martina Andreu proceeds with the Nigerian sex slave case.

About that. Of course Andreu keeps Salgado up to date on everything she learns because Omar has disappeared. Salgado may or may not be a person of interest in this disappearance despite his being in Argentina practically the whole time. Practically. What's worse is that little hints of voodoo curses keep popping up in Salgado's life. While he's not a believer (in any god) it does spook him. He and Andreu both know that is how these sex traffickers enslave the girls. They ply the children with promises, get them to surrender locks of their hair or clips of fingernails in a voodoo rite where they are bound to their "masters" on penalty of death. The girls are duped, avowed and trapped. (See Beyond the Book for a closer look at voodoo and how it has been misused.)

Meanwhile young Vidal's death begins to take on greater depth even as Salgado is cautioned against ruffling the delicate nerves of some of Barcelona's upper class. His life and the novel's tension ratchet up. Those voodoo threats - whatever their origin - now seem to have placed a noose around Salgado's neck. And who, if anyone, killed the Vidal boy? Each page has an almost audible click as the gears of the story wind tighter and tighter. And tighter. Until all - or nearly all - is exposed.

If all this hasn't piqued your curiosity, well, I don't know why. But just telling it this far makes me want to go back and read the book all over again. Yup. It's that good.

Reviewed by Donna Chavez

Above is part of BookBrowse's review of The Summer of Dead Toys. Read the review in full here

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The Zero Sum Game:
A Mathematical Metaphor With Legs
In Give and Take, Adam Grant takes pains to demonstrate that many cold-hearted business transactions actually have a human side - that there is more at stake in contract negotiations, say, than the bottom line. He emphasizes the complexity of the give-and-take in business relationships by pointing out that such negotiations are "not a zero-sum game." Contract negotiations are not a zero-sum game; networking is not a zero-sum game. And so on.

What exactly is a zero-sum game?

Two men are facing each other across a table upon which are placed two goblets full of wine. One goblet contains a deadly poison. Both men must drink, and one will die. One of the men will live, and the price of his life is the death of the other man.

Unless of course one man has secretly built up an immunity to the poison (like Westley in The Princess Bride), or secreted a pouch in his mouth to contain the wine so he doesn't have to swallow it, or entered into some other such far-fetched scheme to avoid the inevitable...But these are literary embellishments, and they break the rules of what is essentially a mathematical concept. In a zero-sum game, for every winner there must be a loser.

The concept of zero-sum comes from game theory. In a zero-sum game, the total of all wins and losses is zero. Poker is a zero-sum game - all the money on the table comes out of the players' pockets, and the winnings you go home with at the end of the night used to belong to someone else. Tennis is another zero-sum game, as is chess. It's tempting to complicate matters by reading in to the strategy behind the game - even if someone loses, you could say that their moves were elegant or that they served particularly well. But this is the literary mind embellishing again. In mathematical terms, there is only one winner and only one loser.

In economics, zero-sum refers to certain money exchanges and not others. Futures trading is a zero-sum game. There were only so many pork bellies to go around, back in the day when we still traded pork belly futures. If I took them from you, it was your loss. The stock market, on the other hand, is not a zero-sum game. The stock market can grow new wealth by bringing in money from outside itself, and in this way can generate more money for everyone. Ditto the reverse.

Business exchanges are more muddy, as Adam Grant points out. You might think of a contract negotiation as zero sum - either you get the money or your boss gets to keep it - but in fact there are many other factors. Money is not the only rubric in business exchanges, or rather, there are intangible factors involved that will lead to a gain or loss of money over time. If your boss pays you more and you leave the contract negotiation happy and motivated, you will likely earn more money for him down the road.

The concept of a zero-sum game begins to fall apart when entering the realm of human relationships. In marriage, for instance, there may be individual contests that read as zero-sum games (if the husband does all the dishes, say, and the wife gets off scott free), but in the long run, there is no clear winner. As a cultural metaphor, however, zero-sum games have rich potential. It's commonplace to point out, as Adam Grant does, what interactions are not zero-sum games. Getting teens to pay attention to its services is not a zero-sum game, says Facebook. Controlling the Internet is not a zero-sum game, says Google's CEO. There's plenty for everyone to have a piece of the pie. We could bake another pie! Let's agree not to drink the poisoned goblets - let's both pour ours on the ground. It's a win-win situation.

Reviewed by Jennifer G Wilder

Above is part of BookBrowse's backstory to Give and Take. Read the review and backstory in full

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