FALSE PROFITS

A Novel By Patricia Smiley

Mysterious Press: 304 pp; $23.95


Consulting with Death

Reviewed by Paula L. Woods, December 19, 2004, Washington Post.

Patricia Smiley tries her hand at the recipe in her debut, False Profits (Mysterious, $23.95), which is set in the world of consulting. For seven years Tucker Sinclair has toiled at L.A.-based Aames & Associates as "a sort of business doctor handling everything from financial facelifts to red-ink bypasses." Tucker is competing with two other senior consultants for a coveted partnership, and hopes that her history of client billings and her recent business plan for Dr. Milton Polk, a neurologist with a scheme to develop a nationwide chain of testing centers, will secure her the promotion.

But she experiences a setback: Her boss, Gordon Aames, reveals that investors in the centers are crying fraud and demanding their money back. It seems that the realistic returns that Tucker projected in Polk's business plan have been inexplicably replaced by numbers that bear no resemblance to reality and which she fears will place her in leg irons with "cell mates named Spike." Supportive yet concerned for his firm's future, Aames asks to see her original copy of the plan. Unable to locate it, Tucker goes to Dr. Polk's office, only to find the office ransacked and the doctor vanished. Before she can get the truth from Polk's jittery office manager, LAPD homicide detective Duane Kleinman calls with even worse news -- the doctor is dead, found on the beach near the Venice pier.

Afraid to reveal the trouble that the bogus business plan has caused her and her firm (and thus label herself a suspect), Tucker sets out to find the document. In the process, she travels from a ritzy Hancock Park fundraiser hosted by one of Polk's shady investors and a key client of her firm, to a manufacturing plant in workaday Santa Fe Springs, uncovering Mrs. Polk's flagrant affair, possible health insurance fraud and a lot more.

Smiley's prose is like butter, and she depicts her major and minor characters with a keen eye for the telling detail (a human resources manager's pageboy haircut is "black and heavy-handed and seemed better suited for someone with a pierced tongue") while the plot hums along like Tucker in her snazzy Porsche Boxster. These elements plus a rich mélange of supporting characters make for an amusing and satisfying read.