1414° by Paul Bradley Carr (audio version)

5 stars

Add this awesome, suspenseful thriller to the top of your hot new books to listen to this summer!

Imagine a San Franciso-based British investigative journalist covering the bro-tech culture of Silicon billionaire hotshots and stumbling across untold instances of covered up sexual abuse by these new captains of industry. Over his 20-year career working for traditional established press (The Guardian, TechCrunch, Wall St. Journal, The Sunday Times) he’s unable to publish all this bad behavior, either from lack of definitive evidence, threats of retaliation, or the cowering of publishers avoiding lawsuits. Well, there we have Paul Bradly Carr, who turns around and writes a debut novel featuring a woman investigative journalist just like him who gets caught in a treacherous web of bad-boy cover-ups due to her expose writing on their acts of misogyny.

Lou McCarthy has wrapped her professional life as a reporter for the Bay Area Herald  around covering Silicon Valley’s tech industry and writing brazen exposes calling out the white-men-ego-tripping sexual abuse. She’s also fought off a hot tech corporation’s takeover and destruction of her rent-controlled building in order to clear the view around their new skyscraper, which ultimately renders her homeless, sleeping in her office. Her latest expose targets that same tech company heading to IPO, Raum, who’s CTO has a long-standing pattern of self-abuse based on all of Lou’s first-person interviews of his victims. But before she can write about any of these past instances, each victim gets bought off with vast sums and goes radio silent on her.

When an anonymous source sends Lou a copy of a sexual assault suit about to be filed, she publishes a piece.  But the copy of the suit turns out to be a mysterious hoax: Lou’s called out for it, her editor is beside himself, the Herald’s legal counsel up in arms about a potential defamation suit. From her the plot rockets into action, with the CTO Lou covered killing himself in spectacular fashion at a private party hosted by Ruam, flinging himself from an upper floor and impaling himself on a ice culture in the inner atrium. Mayhem ensures, a death call from a fringe men’s rights internet group gets put out on Lou, and she’s rescued by a bad-ass corporate-fixer, Helen, a hired-gun who is quietly retained by boards of tech companies about to go public with the task of outing the bad boys. Add on top of this a murderer, who may be systematically and stealthily taking out these bad boys of tech as retaliation for their heinous, unpunished acts.

As Lou and Helen kick into gear, and kick ass in the process, this feminist thriller enthralls while condemning the start-up tech culture in Silicon Valley that turns a blind eye to abusive behavior in the constant quest for the next IPO unicorn that will make all of the investors rich beyond imagining.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced audio recording of this book. 

Stacy DeBroff

Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.com and social and digital consultancy, Influence Central, is a social media strategist, attorney, and best-selling parenting author. A sought-after expert for national media, she trend-spots regularly with national brands and speaks frequently to national and international audiences on a wide range of subjects, including influencer marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and consumer trends. A passionate cook, gardener, reader, and tennis player, she adores this new chapter of post-college-age parenting.