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    Bet Your Life
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    Bet Your Life
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    Bet Your Life
    Ebook365 pages5 hours

    Bet Your Life

    By Richard Dooling

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A terminally ill man sells his life insurance policy for cheap to an investor who will collect the full amount when the sick man dies.But is the sick man really sick? Does he even exist? In the age of AIDS and no-holds-barred capitalism, the business of betting on how much longer sick people will live is thriving. Is this new market in which life insurance policies are bought and sold a legitimate enterprise, or is it an open invitation to fraud and murder?

    Carver Hartnett, Miranda Pryor, and Leonard Stillmach all work for Reliable Allied Trust, in Omaha, where they investigate insurance fraud. Carver -- the narrator of this edgy and surprising novel -- is frustrated. His company would rather raise premiums than prosecute insurance criminals. Miranda, his seductive coworker, leads him on and then puts him off -- she seems to have something monstrous to hide. When their friend, crazy Lenny, a computer gamer and an expert with drug-and-alcohol cocktails, dies in the middle of playing Delta-Strike online, a strange and disturbing narrative unfolds around a possible murder and massive insurance fraud. Carver is drawn deeper into various hearts of darkness, and in his efforts to discover the truth behind his friend's death, he ends up betting his own life.

    Filled with memorable characterizations -- Carver's boss, the shrewd Old Man Norton; Dagmar Helveg, Norton's fascist assistant; regional investigator Charlie Becker, a plain-talking, commonsense cop -- Bet Your Life conducts a stealthy philosophical investigation of its own, in which our hero ends up investigating the mysteries of his soul.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061877520
    Unavailable
    Bet Your Life
    Author

    Richard Dooling

    Richard Dooling is a writer and a lawyer. His second novel, White Man's Grave, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and he has also been a finalist for a National Magazine Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. He lives with his wife and children in Omaha, and commutes online to Bryan Cave, LLP, in St Louis, where he specializes in developing Web-based legal products.

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    Reviews for Bet Your Life

    4/5

    12 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Investigating insurance fraud is the day job for three friends in their 20s. They work for a giant company and are small cogs but they are good. And then one of them gets fired and then killed. This books is very different. The story is good but the background information is fascinating. This guy does know his computers and it shows. And he seems to know his insurance (but I don't so I have to assume he's right here) and he pulls it all together pretty well.
    • 4/5
      Maddeningly enjoyable/ frustrating crime novel with elements of pulp, technobabble and satire thrust together uncomfortably. You get the impression Dooling isn't always entirely at home with the IT speak, and it's a shame as it detracts from some punchy, enjoyable writing and a surprisingly well developed plot. Certainly the end is one of the few conclusions that more than makes up for the struggles of the earlier chapters. One major quibble though - is this the most arbitrary cover for a book ever? None of the characters look a bit like those shown here and I spent a good half of the book wondering if suddenly the narrator and co. would be sidelined accordingly if the cover stars *did* arrive. Rather odd that.