Offering an unusual spin on a love triangle plot, leadership consultant Wareham (How to Break Out of Prison) explores lies told in the name of obsessive love and corporate head-hunting. Australian Chancey Haste is a smooth-talking recruiter with a beautiful and supportive wife, two kids and a passion for expanding his eponymous firm. Then he becomes entranced with Elan Haverford, the stunning (and young) daughter of a New Zealand client, and after a brief but ardent pursuit, Chancey begins making regular trips to see her. His marriage holds up during the book's relatively lighthearted first half, and, after much poetry-quoting and love-making, his affair with Elan seems to end. When they meet again by chance, Chancey is living in New York, working in his firm's U.S. office, and Elan has a frumpy aristocratic husband from London in tow. Sparks fly despite the intervening years, but Elan refuses to rekindle the flame. Desperate to see her, Chancey decides to follow Elan to England on the pretense of a business trip, but his wife, who has known about the affair for some time, gives him the heave-ho. What Chancey finds in England is a sudden and terrible tragedy, redeemed barely, if at all, by Chancey's evolution from an unfaithful and often despicable fop to a man who finally understands what he's lost. Though Wareham employs too many disturbing dream sequences and his dialogue errs on the side of falsely snappy, his writing is assured throughout. As an exploration of the moral quandaries of head-hunting and the passionate heights of sensual love, this is a strange and intermittently affecting tale. (July)
