Executive Roadkill

Sisti's real strength here is the granular, lived-in texture of corporate bureaucracy — not a thriller's usual world (docks, precincts, war rooms) but cubicles, purchasing departments, and printing procurement, rendered with the specificity of someone who actually sat through those meetings. The dot-structure showdown with the printer Tim Spears, where Dave pulls out a loupe and says "I know my dots, and your dots are not good dots," is a small, satisfying set piece — a workplace power play staged like a heist. The Landrieu pharmacy-bag scheme and the prologue's backroom martini deal between Jack and Phil Lyons plant a slow-burn corruption plot that promises a corporate-thriller payoff, and the framing device (this is "based on actual events") gives the insider details — RIHIP's market collapse from 85% to 49%, the silo warfare between Marketing and Purchasing — real texture that readers who've worked in corporate America will recognize, as the blurbs from actual businesspeople attest.

Where the book currently under-delivers for the thriller/suspense category specifically is pacing and tension: these opening chapters read as workplace-satire episodes (email jokes, golf outings, water-cooler banter) rather than a mounting thriller engine. The prologue's ominous handshake deal is the genre hook, but chapters 1-20 mostly detour into Dave's professional triumphs before that thread resurfaces. Still, the corporate-conspiracy scaffolding — legislators, lobbyists, kickback schemes, an executive on the rise who doesn't yet see the trap closing — is a legitimate, well-observed setup, and the world it builds is distinctive enough to earn recognition.