The Deal

Weak prose, including ill-chosen similes (""My mind started throwing around possibilities like swelling kernels in a popcorn maker"") and artless attempts to reduce New York City's commercial real estate world to a laundry list of adjectives, mars Gittlin's second thriller (after 2004's The Men Downstairs). Jonah Gray, a young, ambitious New York City commercial real estate broker, has a taste for the fast life. His insatiable hunger for challenging work meets his match when an old friend, Russian gas mogul Andreu Zhamovsky, asks him to arrange a purchase of property worth $500 million in three weeks. After Gray mobilizes his equally high-charged partners, the team crafts an ingenious strategy to simultaneously pursue three separate deals to maximize their options and leverage. But the story takes an implausible turn after someone plants a stolen Faberge egg on Gray, leading him to wonder who's setting him up and why. The author, a commercial real estate executive himself, provides an authentic view of his professional world, but the far-fetched plot and a thoroughly unsympathetic main character make for a lackluster read.