Poison Pill by Glenn Kaplan

Published by Forge Books on October 22, 2013

The title of Poison Pill has a double meaning. It's the name given to a strategy to prevent hostile takeovers of corporations -- in this case, a pharmaceutical company -- but its literal meaning is also applicable. Someone is poisoning the company's leading product (a headache remedy) in order to destroy the company's value.

In chapter two, Peter Katz tells his mother all about the safe room in the basement of his father's Greenwich house. The savvy reader knows that, like Chekov's gun hanging on the wall, the safe room will reappear near the end of the novel. Peter's mother, Emma, is an executive at Percival & Baxter, a pharmaceutical company. His father, Emma's ex-husband Josh, is planning a hostile takeover of Percival & Baxter for his client, a mysterious Russian named Viktor Volkov whose reason for wanting control of the company is far-fetched but amusing. Viktor, hoping to create a dynasty in London, wants his daughter Tanya to breed with the little brother of the woman Viktor plans to marry, thus merging his wealth with the brother's title and producing the heirs he can no longer manufacture. Tanya wouldn't mind breeding but she has her own ideas about an appropriate sperm donor.

In many ways, young Peter is the most interesting character in the novel. He's caught in the middle of a war between his hotshot parents. His father wants to use him to influence his mother while his mother is poisoning his thoughts about his father. Peter and Tanya both belong to the Kroesus Club, an exclusive group of teens and young adults, the children of wealthy parents from around the world, a group that Peter generally despises. Peter is peripheral to the central story for much of the novel but he stars in an interesting subplot of his own. He is a believable character, although perhaps a bit more grounded and likeable than most teenage offspring of wealthy parents.

The other characters, like the plot, are well-conceived, although you wouldn't want to hang out with most of them. Family dramas pepper the novel and they turn out to be related to each other in unexpected ways. Scenes of domestic discord between well-paid Emma and her struggling artist second husband are dull and some of the scenes involving Emma and Josh approach melodrama, but there aren't many of those.

An interesting theme in Poison Pill is the ongoing debate about hostile takeovers. Josh sees himself as creating shareholder value while Emma sees him as destroying good companies. Greed is a related theme and while the lesson is obvious (greed isn't good), it is nonetheless satisfying. Those themes animate the thriller in a fairly conventional way. The story races to an unconvincing ending (Emma displays intuition that borders on ESP) that wraps up the story a little too neatly, but the novel as a whole is better than its disappointing climax.

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