Geek Mafia

Geek Mafia by Rick Dakan

—–

Imagine that you’ve created a successful comic book, and with your friends, you’ve managed to create a software company to turn that comic book into a computer game.  Now, your friends decide that your usefulness to that company is over, and they’re firing you.  You have 24 hours to collect yourself before the board meeting where everyone votes on the issue, but you know that nothing you do will change the outcome of the vote.  You meet a cute, pink-haired techno geek who offers to help you out by blackmailing your friends into paying you a hefty sum of money before firing you.  And you do it.  After that, your attraction to the techno geek, along with your loss of direction, encourages you to hook up with her and her group of con artists and hackers.  Except how can you trust a group of people who claim to be your friends, when all they seem to want to do it con people out of their money?

Welcome to Geek Mafia!   This is a thoroughly enjoyable novel, with enough double-crosses, twists, turns, and odd characters to make the season finale of “The Sopranos” look cheap by comparison.  The author creates a compelling story, with likable characters and enough suspense to keep the story moving at a fast pace.  The entire story is told from the perspective of Paul Reynolds, the comic book artist, so the reader is never let inside the heads of the other characters to fully understand their motivations.  It keeps you guessing along with Paul, which is the best way to read this sort of novel.

Dakan does a fine job of creating his characters, especially since very few of the main characters would be normally likable.  They’re con artists, for crying out loud, and they manipulate their targets’ emotions to make them do what they want them to do.  Paul has a few moments of hesitation at some of the actions they take, but for the most part he has no qualms with taking other people’s money.  What begins as an attraction to Chloe turns into a legitimate desire to join the crew and live off the grid, if only because he wants to stay with her.  This romantic subplot is actually integral to the main plot, because without Chloe, Paul would be back in his normal life, living with his parents in Florida.

I have to give Dakan credit for developing the relationship between Paul and Chloe slowly, giving it more tension than if they immediately fell for each other.  It works very well, though, since Paul’s trust grows slowly.  He likes her, and he seems to think that she’s genuinely interested in him, but at the same time, she helped him get $850,000 from his previous employers, and he wonders if he was as much of a mark as all the other people she and her crew target.  So his trust, and the story, develops slowly.

This is a fun novel to read, and you can get it for $5.00 from the author.  Shoot, if you want to be as bad as Chloe and Paul, you could even get it for free from the author!  How cool is that?  Personally, I think you should choose the first option and buy the book.  It’s only $5.00, and you would be supporting the author to write another novel.  Geek Mafia is a clear indication that Dakan is a writer to watch, and I would be interested in reading more of his work.

Advertisement