Atria, 352 pages, $27
I actually like numbers. Numbers and science are my friends. I like $$ but have no deep desire to turn that into $$$$$. (I don’t even know any people with $$$$$.) I don’t watch all those money-grubbing shows on television. “Strike Me Down” didn’t sound like a book in which I’d find many sympathetic characters. These days, it’s all about the characters. And sympathy.
I read the book anyway.
The main character, a forensic accountant named Nora Trier, turned out to be fascinating. She has a pivotal backstory but it was on the book’s back burner. Nora is humorless and calculating, perhaps a bit of a stereotype for an accountant, but the characteristics serve her well in turning up malfeasance in the financial affairs of her clients.
The book, contrary to expectations, starts off with a bang. Fifty thousand people are chasing Nora Trier in a sports arena in downtown Minneapolis. What in all heck has she done to deserve that? The rest of the book is spent explaining how she got to that point.
Logan Russo may be fifty years old, but she is a super-star athlete. She has won kickboxing matches all over the world, co-owns a premier sporting brand, has opened a large number of gyms, and is slavishly followed by a massive number of people. She and her husband called their enterprise Strike. They are just about to hold a tournament to end all tournaments. At stake is twenty million dollars in prize money and the honor for one of the contestants to be the new face shown on all of Strike’s product packaging.
The only problem is the prize money is missing in action. Gregg Abbott, Logan’s husband, hires Nora’s forensic accounting company to track it down. Nora immediately recognizes Gregg as the man she slept with on an out-of-town trip. She did not know he was Logan’s husband, and she never saw him again. In a separate coincidence, Nora turns out to be one of Logan’s slavish followers. She takes classes from her at Strike’s flagship gym, just down the walkway from her office. (As a place of much snow and cold, downtown Minneapolis has eleven miles of walkways so people can navigate the inhospitable winter climate.) Awkward. In a real life situation, that would be enough to preclude an accountant from doing forensic work for a business. But this is fiction, so have at it!
Gregg thinks Logan has taken the money. Double awkward.
On the surface all the primary characters keep much too cool. I mean alabaster. Inside, apparently volcanic activity. There’s a lot of smoldering, jealousy, anger, and frustration, albeit you can’t see it. For a seething, sweaty, sexy book, there’s very little sex. There’s seething and sweat, though. It’s intense.
I finished the book because I was captivated by Nora’s character and backstory. As the primary on the case, she provided the outline for the investigation. But her minions did the backbreaking paper-shuffling and tracing, so the story wouldn’t be slowed down. I can’t say I feel the same sort of fascination for Logan. I was not ready to bow and scrape before her. Gregg? He was a sad man. Author Mindy Mejia is the mistress of innuendo and provocation, but mostly her characters were fleshless. On second thought, I mostly did like one of the secondary characters, Nora’s best friend at her agency, Corbett MacDermott. (In horror movies it doesn’t pay to be the best friend of the main character!)
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