REVIEW: The Tipping Point (+$50 Amazon GC Giveaway!)

Title: The Tipping Point

Author: Walter Danley

Series: N/A

Pages: 352

Date Published: May 1st, 2013

Publisher: Marble Arch Communications

Format: Kindle

Genre: Thriller

Source: Goddess Fish Blog Tours

Synopsis:
When Tom Burke dies skiing Aspen Mountain, his business partner Garth Wainwright must find his killer. Burke was murdered, and Wainwright seeks the cause. Cautioned to leave it to the authorities, Wainwright won’t let go. His two closest partners, Tom Shaw and Robert Keating don’t believe his suspicions. Searching for the killer unearths a conspiracy of millions of embezzled dollars and partner collaboration. Whom can he trust?

Suddenly, a second partner is murdered. The fraud and the murders are connected. Exposure of the fraud will destroy the company; the SEC will shut it down. Wainwright is concerned for his personal safety and net worth. One of his partners is a killer.

When Wainwright falls in love with Lacey Kinkaid, a former Boston criminal prosecutor, they devise a plan to smoke out the guilty partners, without exposing the fraud to the SEC & FBI. A perilous dance of deception implements the complicated strategy. The plan forces the killer to surface … and then … another partner dies.

Partner Bennie Rubens contracted the murders from Ariel Amiti, an ex-Israeli major, former Mossad agent and assassin. Rubens escapes to the Bahamas, accompanied by Wainwright’s former lover, BJ Dreaver. Wainwright and the FBI are close on his trail.

Ten business partners succumb in four assassinations, one suicide, and three bankruptcies leaving Wainwright and Shaw to exorcise greed, complicity, and fraud and restructure the company to its former acclaim.

~My Thoughts~

Garth Wainright is like the Christian Grey of high-finance. He's wealthy, he's suave, but his co-workers are being murdered left and right and he's not really sure what to do about it. Part procedural drama, part murder-mystery, teensy bit romance, this book has a lot and then some to make even the most picky reader find something that they will enjoy. 

Garth's personality was a bit dry in his delivery. I liked him and he had a strong and honest figure to him that made him seem like the good boy-scout...or sexy boy next door. He did read a bit like a goody-two-shoes, but that got better as the book moved along, and it was fun to see how clever he was. The romance between Garth and Lacey was sweet and realistic...with lots of quips and sass along the way that made  you kind of want them to just get it on already. I actually think that the character development of Garth from beginning to end was my favorite, closely followed by Garth and Lacey's relationship. 
If I could think of one word to describe The Tipping Point, it would be "Wordy". While that can be a good thing, in this instance it may have hurt the book in my opinion. The book felt like someone was trying to describe the scene rather than just describing it. Sentences would meander around, sometimes making sense...other times not so much. I felt like the ideas were strong, and they were heavily present in the author's tone...but sometimes he got a bit tripped up in what he was trying to say, and simply forgot to say it. 

The visuals were nice though. You really feel the cut of the wind or the ice, and the burn of heat and salt on skin. Thoughts, music, description all blended beautifully to create an imitation of life that was quite flawless. This lent itself to the plot as well, and with each new development, each new clue, you felt yourself unraveling the mystery and moving forward in a rush to solve the crime!

~Try an Excerpt!~

Burke crested the ridge and shot down the exposed slope at top speed. The trail’s steepest section was a windblown, naked mountainside where icy wind crusted the snow into a slick, slippery stretch. Burke concentrated hard to keep his skis under him on the sheer incline. He leaned low, edging his skis into the hill. Burke heard the wind in his ears and the chattering steel cutting ice. He skied toward the spot where the trail turned back into the forest, across the ridge, and through a stand of mature Aspen.

~Meet Walter!~ 

Danley’s blue-collar background is far from the high-flying characters of The Tipping Point. He was born an Indiana Hoosier before Danley’s family moved to California when his father took employment as a machinist in a World War II defense plant. 

Following D-Day, Walter Sr. reasoned that returning service men and women passing through the beautiful state of California might want to live there. He decided to be a home building contractor. His idea was good; the small error was that Danley’s dad built houses one at a time while contractors on the east coast built thousands at a time. However, this is the environment that young Walter grew up in; construction and real estate. 

Much later, Walter served his country as a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman. After Corp School Danley, thinking Medical Doctor as his career goal, enrolled in a specialist school as an Operating Room Technician (read scrub nurse) and transferred to the San Diego Naval Hospital. 

He had the good fortune to work on the sixth floor Sick Officers Quarters with the Navy’s best. It is the Chiefs of Staff for each service; Orthopedics, Oncology, Internal Medicine, and others that tend to the patients in SOQ, and this became fodder for his fantasized future career. 

The US Navy had little interest in his post-Naval plans. Danley was eventually transferred to the Fleet Marine Force as a Medic at U.S. Marine Corps’ Weapons Training Battalion, San Diego. Young Marine Corp recruits spent weeks training with the Corp’s small arms weapons. With live ammunition in the hands of trainees, a Medic was required to be on duty on the firing range. The author reports that there are many stories from the firing range and that some of these will undoubtedly find their way into future Danley novels! 

Following an honorable discharge and with a new wife, he found his way back to the construction industry, selling kitchen cabinets to tract house and apartment builders. With bidding new construction projects and attending college at night, it left little time to help his wife raise his first two sons. 

It was at this time Danley was recruited to join a commercial real estate firm. The first few years were spent in the land business, managing sales crews on projects as varied as raw acreage, improved lots and commercial land suitable for shopping centers or industrial parks. That set the stage for moving into income properties. Danley spent most of his working career on the investment side of this business. 

Danley’s five grown sons have parented many grandchildren for him while building their own successful careers. He credits their mother’s outstanding child rearing skills together with the wonderful influence of their stepmother, Christopher Norris—a Broadway, film, and television actress—for the fine family with which he is blessed. Walter and Christopher were married for eighteen years, during the boys’ formative years. She remains a good friend to the boys and Walter. 

Danley reignited his education in mid-career at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, earning an MBA. Encouraged by the Pepperdine experience, he pursued a terminal degree in Management Theory at the Peter F. Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate School of Business.

A four-decade veteran of real estate investments on a national platform, Danley authored the course, Creative and Unconventional Finance and taught it at five campuses of the University of California Extension School for several years. During that period, Danley served on the UCLA Real Estate Advisory Board. 

Walter lives in the Texas Hill Country, where he works on Inside Moves, the sequel to his suspense thriller, The Tipping Point. He confides that the Inside Moves will test his protagonist in ways unimagined in earlier works. Beyond that novel in Danley’s work in process and scheduled for release in 2016, is an as yet untitled stand-alone mystery. Danley describes it as a historical western but with a fantasy twist.

Walter will be awarding a $50 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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