Dead Money by Jakob Kerr

Published by Bantam on January 28, 2025

Dead Money is an engaging whodunit set in the world of venture capital and technology startups. Trevor Canon is the CEO of Journy, a company that seems to combine Lyft-like services with Lime-like rentals. Journy has not yet gone public but is expected to make Canon even wealthier when it does.

Canon is murdered in his office while he’s working late. Shortly before his murder, Canon changed his will to specify that, in the event of his murder, his shares in Journy could not be distributed to other investors in the company until the murderer is convicted.

The company’s executives each own a piece of the company, as does Hammersmith Venture, the venture capital firm that financed Journy’s startup. Journy’s five key executives carried keycards that would have provided access to the elevator leading to the CEO’s office, making them the prime suspects.

Mackenzie Clyde is a lawyer employed by Hammersmith Venture. Mackenzie does not perform traditional legal work. She investigates and troubleshoots problems, reporting directly to the firm’s CEO, Roger Hammersmith. Mackenzie is not impressed by the tech industry, which she describes as “a giant, soulless, self-propelling machine that runs on its own bullshit.” Sounds about right.

Intermittent flashbacks provide insight into Mackenzie’s nature. She grew up feeling freakish because of her unusual height. She took refuge in basketball until a male student who read and copied her essay falsely claimed that she copied his work. School officials knew the kid was lying but his father was rich and important so they suspended Mackenzie (but not the male) from extracurricular activities. That experience might cause some people to resent the privilege that attends wealth, but it motivated Mackenzie to acquire wealth of her own.

Mackenzie’s mother taught her to seize opportunities — specifically, opportunities to become wealthy — because power is the only shield against the powerful. Mackenzie went to law school and accepted a job with a Big Law firm. Before she started, she met Eleanor Eden, a woman who wrote a bestselling book about how women can shatter the glass ceiling. Mackenzie called out the book as bullshit, earning Eleanor’s admiration. Eleanor admits the book was full of nonsense but writing it was an end to a means.

Eleanor advised Mackenzie to ditch Big Law and move to the West, where opportunities for success abound. Mackenzie took a job as in-house lawyer with Hammersmith Venture. How she became Roger Hammersmith’s personal fixer is a mystery I won’t spoil.

In fact, saying much more about the plot would risk spoiling it. It is enough to know that Hammersmith designates Mackenzie as his liaison to the FBI, which takes over the investigation of Trevor’s murder. Mackenzie works closely with Agent Jameson Danner, whose father is a wealthy senator, as they interview the prime suspects and work their way to a reveal of the killer’s identity.

Although three of the four key characters — Mackenzie, her mother, and Eleanor — are morally suspect, they all justify their actions with the conviction that opportunities are meant to be seized, even if others must suffer. This seems suspiciously similar to the philosophies that drive Silicon Valley startups and Big Law, philosophies that Mackenzie seems to find appalling, but Mackenzie’s beliefs are more nuanced (and less admirable) than they first appear.

Danner at least is law-abiding, but he suffers from the usual law enforcement belief that using other people to build a criminal case is always justified — all the more so if the manipulation advances his career. Fortunately, fictional characters don’t need to be morally stalwart to be interesting. Whether they are right or wrong, the characters act consistently with their beliefs. I can’t say I cared about any of the characters by the novel’s end, but I didn’t dislike any of them, and I admired Jakob Kerr’s willingness to take chances with characters who might turn off readers with their unsavory behavior.

I also appreciated an offbeat plot that doesn’t depend on a tough guy saving the day by being tougher than everyone else. Dead Money is carefully constructed to give the reader an opportunity to piece together clues in search of the killer’s identity. The final reveal is surprising and surprisingly believable. A clever reader might guess parts of the answer but I doubt that most will work it out entirely. Kerr nevertheless plays fair by giving the reader a reasonable opportunity to solve the puzzle. Those elements combine to make Dead Money one of the smartest crime novels I’ve read in the last several months.

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