The Wild Card: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Not quite a winning hand
Review: Five childhood friends live their lives obsessed by poker and haunted by a secret tragedy. Every year, four of them get together for a weekend-long reunion in San Fransisco where they play an epic game of poker and relive their youths. Only one -- Bobby McCorkle -- has refused to attend these games until finally, the details of that hidden tragedy threaten to bubble to the surface. This year, Bobby attends the game and, over the course of one chaotic weekend, the truth is finally revealed. Its a good premise for a thriller but Mark Joseph's The Wild Card ends up promising more than it delivers.

Probably the most important element of any thriller are creating credible, believable characters. If you can buy the characters and their motivations, even the most improbable of twists can be accepted. Unfortunately, with the exception of Bobby and occasionally gambling addicted Alex, the main characters never really stand out from each other. Each is given one trait to set them apart (one is gay, another Chinese) but otherwise, they're basically interchangeable. Since very little seems to be happening inside the characters (and most of their dialouge feels forced and leaden), the book's attempts at creating a psychological thriller fall flat. As well, the deep, dark secret should be obvious to most readers as soon as they read the first chapter. With a few noteable exceptions, the book lacks a certain element of surprise that a succesful thriller needs to keep the reader on the edge of his seat.

That said, there are also a few elements that work quite well. The author is, himself, a poker player and the game scenes crackle with a vibrancy that the rest of the book lacks. (Though, by the end, his oft-repeated message that poker represents the twists and turns of life starts to feel just a bit heavy handed and forced.) Though he's hardly a master of prose, Joseph is a good story teller and the book is a quick read. Even if it didn't enthrall me, the Wild Card certainly didn't bore me either. As well, the ending's final twist, if a little improbable (as most final twists are), is a genuine surprise and does stick in the reader's mind after he finishes the book. On the whole, an uneven thriller that certainly has its moments. One could do worse when looking for a book to pass a rainy afternoon with.

Rating:
Summary: The Perfect Book For Guys To Bond With
Review: Joseph's new book, "The Wild card," finds the author taking an interesting break from his usual techno-thriller style of writing and exploring new territory as a spinner of more broadly accessible suspense yarns. The result is a rather winning piece of work, at least in terms of storytelling. First of all, the whole book has a sort of Americana, meat-and-potatoes ambience in terms of its writing--Joseph brings to mind Stephen King's knack for evoking eras, places, and events in the recent American past and in the present, and the ability to capture the straightforward emotions of individual characters embroiled in those "snapshots of time,"--especially in somewhat questionable, shady situations.The feel reminds me of King's short story "The Body," upon which "Stand By me" was based, and this is a favorable comparison, obviously. The book starts right off the bat with suspense; within two pages Joseph conjures the indelible image of a busy riverside suburb in northern California--an image suddenly twisted by the problematic discovery of a skeleton. 'The Wild Card' is a character-driven tale, so it helps that the reader can't help but take a liking to the very first character Joseph draws: a female bulldozer operator who discovers the bones and is forced to take a ten-minute cigarette break in the cab of her vehicle, pondering in the workday heat while her inner-moral compass decides whether to report the finding or simply "ditch" the cadaver and keep her paycheck secure. Being, as Joseph describes, "an honest sort," she spills the beans and sets in motion the typically American brand of frantic investigative activity that usually leads to the suspicion of foul play. Now, the stage is set for the heart of the story: five men with a potentially shattering secret in their pre-Vietnam era past--four of these men still meet annually for a raucous poker game in a San Francisco hotel suite, but ONE of the former clique, a near-vagabond gambling addict named Bobby, has ostracized himself from his friends' yearly revelries. Trust me: he has good reason. However, with the grisly discovery, the jig is suddenly up and Joseph successfully creates the tense, charged atmosphere of an almost ritualistic poker gathering. Instead of halting their good time, the discovery of the skeleton brings this bunch of guys together in a palpably tense, almost frightening manner. Joseph's writing is effective enough here that you almost want to reach in and wipe the sweat from their foreheads. What each of them has to reveal about their recollection of poor Sally (and her long-ago fate) seems designed by the author to show the nature of the tricky business we might call "individual human perspective." Of course, card game imagery is "shuffled" into the plot at a number of turns, but it doesn't come off as being too contrived because Joseph is sort of churning toward a conclusion that brings these images into union with his number one image: *THE* wild card--poor, enigmatic Bobby McCorkle. Obviously, the story whips up the suspense quotient at a swift pace, and the whole point is to make you salivate for the conclusion (and believe me, you do). Also of note:the San Francisco setting is used to extremely good effect throughout the tale--if the author is planning another thriller set in the city by the bay, then that is good news, because his particular vision of San Francisco grabs. On a very minor note, the dialogue of Joseph's characters can be inexplicably clunky, but only on a few occasions, and their use of profanity is often so gratuitous as to be genuinely irritating and too contrived. This book is, without question, the ideal read for a man who wants to kick back in his easy chair after a hard-day's work, drink a Scotch (or a Bud), and sink into a fast-paced, gripping tale about five other guys who are knee-deep in some potentially serious manure ...basically,this book has "guy" written all over it. It's hard to find a man who hasn't taken part in the thrill of a poker game at some time or another, so "Wild card" is probably the best book out right now to buy as a gift for a man--whether he reads a great deal or not. Buy it, and watch how easy it is for your husband or boyfriend to really bond with a book.

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: Not a great novel at all, and not satisfying to someone looking for fiction concerning poker in particular.