Imagine that everything you love and believe in is threatened. Your wife’s nearly been killed, your business is failing and your late aunt has been cheated out of a Nobel Prize. This is reality for Ian Michaels, the protagonist of Palo Alto High School graduate and parent Keith Raffel’s latest thriller, Smasher, which is set in Palo Alto.
Smasher, the sequel to Raffel’s 2006 debut Dot Dead, continues the story of Ian Michaels, who once again must protect his family, his business and himself from the unsavory elements of Silicon Valley society. Raffel successfully takes this thriller to the next level, expanding on characters and developing a cohesive plotline to create a dynamic and entertaining story.
Ian’s fight begins with a struggle against a millionaire businessman for control of his company, which is rapidly failing and in need of funds. Meanwhile, at the request of his mother, he must bring credit to his late aunt, a ground-breaking physicist at Stanford who was cheated out of a Nobel Prize when she was killed prematurely in a car accident.
The plot of the novel flies into motion when Ian’s wife, Rowena, a deputy D.A., is almost killed in a car crash after being threatened in court, leading Ian to believe she is a target for murder. This event acts as a catalyst for the rest of the novel, shifting Ian from one problem to the next and setting the tone of the novel as a fast-paced page-turner.
The plot progresses and new mysteries are revealed, which Ian tackles with his signature mix of wit, impulse and sincerity. Raffel uses Smasher to enhance Ian Michaels’ character as an intelligent and likeable man determined to unravel the mysteries he faces.
Raffel says he enjoys writing from the perspective of Ian Michaels.
“I like to write from the point of view of someone else, so what I try to do in that story is put myself in the view of someone who it would be fun to be,” Raffel said. “The fact that this character is bright, attractive to women, well to do, a CEO and has a great wife all make him that much more fun to be.”
Over the course of the novel, Ian grapples with the difficult question of revenge: what is he willing to do to avenge the wrongdoings perpetrated against him and his family? His central motives in the novel are to capture his wife’s assailant, restore his aunt’s legacy and save his failing business from the corporate powers that threaten it, but he often struggles with how far he can go to achieve these goals, repeatedly overstepping the law in order to get what he wants.
In the novel Raffel adds a layer of mystery to Palo Alto by creating an underground network of backhanded business deals, deceitful professors and murder. This adds a new dimension to the thriller, making it suspenseful and intriguing.
Raffel founded UpShot Corporation in 1997 and, as a Silicon Valley insider, he provides intimate details about the intricacies of Silicon Valley businesses and how corporate politics are about as important as the products they are developing. His analysis of Silicon Valley speaks relevantly about the new technologies being created today and the corporate arenas that dominate them.
“There are stories now about how banks are afraid to loan money to people and I think the same thing is happening in the venture capitalist world,” Raffel said. “There are big companies doing great stuff and venture capitalist are afraid to invest in them . . . so this crisis of companies to gain capital is very real today.”
Raffel says he also wrote the book to expose people to the ground-breaking discoveries in the field of physics made by scientists at Stanford.
“My dad was one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley so I had a sense of what was going on in high tech in the valley,” Raffel said. “What I didn’t know when I was growing up was the incredible things that were going on at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. I wanted to be sure to weave in the stuff that was going on in SLAC those days because I don’t think people in the valley know about it.”
The plot moves with high velocity, providing for an exciting and compelling read. Raffel draws connections between each of Michaels’ eminent problems to create a cohesive storyline that effectively combines the thrills of backstabbing businessmen, greedy professors and suspect assassins.
Raffel cleverly merges the worlds of business, academia and crime to create a realistic yet imaginative novel that will deeply engage readers.
Published by Midnight Ink, Smasher is available for purchase online at Raffel’s Web site.