The Wild Card
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Four grown men, friends since childhood-a man of though, a man of leisure, an outlaw, and a cop-reunite in San Francisco for a weekend-long game of cards in the Palace Hotel's Enrico Caruso Suite. Every year they do this. It gives them a chance to catch up, to renew their friendships, to relive their glory days. To smoke, drink, laugh, and lose themselves and their cares for a couple of days. It also allows them to reaffirm, by unspoken consent, that the deadly secret they share has remained safe for another year.
Thirty years earlier, there were five friends. Just out of high school, preparing for college, optimistic and energetic, they took a boat trip up a river. Then an outburst of drunken teenage savagery at a place called Shanghai Bend left four boys scrambling to cover their tracks. And a fifth, Bobby McCorkle, disappeared...
For thirty years Bobby drifted aimlessly: through the firefights of Vietnam, across the United States and back a hundred times, and into every numbed recess of his conscience that heroin and alcohol could take him. He survived by his wits, but he lived by his trade: he became a gambler.
In 1995 construction crews dig up a skeleton at Shanghai Bend. Now McCorkle must rejoin his old pals at the card table and confront their secret together. What does each man bring? How much does each know? And how far will each go to protect the secret? The game begins, the stakes go up. Will they be exposed? Will their lives be ruined? Bluff. Double bluff. Call. Before the weekend is over, these five men will find themselves playing for their lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Poker," thinks Bobby McCorkle, "is monotonous, routine work." Unfortunately, the same might be said of Joseph's repetitive, disappointing and cynical fifth novel (Deadline Y2K; To Kill the Potemkin). One summer night in 1963, Bobby and his four closest friends from high school Alex, Dean, Nelson and Charlie along with Sally, a beautiful 16-year-old runaway, boat along the Sacramento Valley's Feather River, drinking and playing cards. Before the night ends, Sally is dead, and the lives of the five young men have been irrevocably altered. Bobby, once bound to study at Berkeley, decides instead to enlist and heads straight for Vietnam. The other four begin to meet every year, mostly to play high-stakes poker, but also to prove to themselves that their awful secret is still safe. When Sally's remains are discovered in May 1995, the four, after decades of trying, finally convince Bobby their "wild card" to return for the game. A professional poker player, Bobby is drawn by the possibility of a big score, but he also wants to hear the others' versions of what happened on the banks of the Feather. Like characters in a sort of lightweight Rashomon, each player has a different take. The only thing they do agree upon is that the time has come for a price to be paid. Most of the novel takes place around a card table, and with Joseph's less-than-subtle, workmanlike style, the conversation isn't exactly engaging. The characters are badly drawn types, the ending is easily predictable and clich s and sloppy constructions abound. Though Joseph clearly knows poker, his book has as many weak joists as a house of cards.
