At First Sight [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio Cassette]

Stephen J. Cannell (Author), Scott Brick (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 2008

Meet Chick Best – a middle-aged, self-absorbed California dot.com millionaire. Other than his house and high-priced foreign cars, Chick’s most expensive possession is his trophy wife, Evelyn. Evelyn is good at spending Chick’s money, money that has pretty much run out. Another problem is his drug-addled sixteen-year-old daughter, Melissa. Though concerned about his family, Chick has resigned himself to a miserable state of acceptance. That is, until he, Evelyn, and Melissa take a Christmas vacation in Maui. With this, Chick’s life changes… Chick experiences unrequited love at first sight when he observes Paige Ellis emerging from the hotel swimming pool. His obsession, exceeded only by his need to possess her, isn’t diminished when he learns that she is happily married. Instead, Chick’s obsession compels him to drive to Paige’s house, where he runs down and kills her husband. Chick’s life begins to spiral homicidally out of control, resulting in the destruction of everything he holds dear. Will Paige learn the truth about Chick before it’s too late? Fast paced, filled with wry humor, murder, lust, and dead-on L.A. characterizations, Cannell has written his most explosive novel yet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Scott Brick turns Cannell's over-the-top and completely stereotypical story into a rousing and endlessly exciting listening experience. Cannell's latest tells the tale of dot-com millionaire Chick Best, a family man who becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman by the pool while on Christmas vacation. There is the spoiled housewife that spends without a care in the world, the drugged-out teenager who couldn't care less about her parents, and the sexy, mysterious stranger who becomes the object of Best's every thought. As familiar as it all sounds, Brick offers a fantastic reading in which he delves so deeply into the character of Chick Best that he almost starts to go crazy himself. The performance is not the least bit overplayed. Brick's uncanny ability to tear words from the page and breathe life into them is almost scary, and the end result is perhaps one of the best commercial thriller audio books in recent memory. A Vanguard Press hardcover (Reviews, May 26). (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist

Cannell steps away from his Shane Scully series and produces what might be his best novel yet. Chick Best is a dot-com millionaire who has fallen on hard times: his money has nearly run out, his lavish lifestyle is in serious jeopardy, and his marriage is, to put it mildly, stagnant. It’s getting very hard to maintain his sense of entitlement in a world that doesn’t seem to recognize his importance. Then Chick meets Paige Ellis—well, he doesn’t so much meet her as see her emerging from a hotel pool—and promptly falls in love. So he does what any hormone-infested egotist would do: he arranges to meet the object of his affection/obsession, then murders her husband, and . . . well, let’s just say that’s merely the beginning. The novel is compulsively and stylishly written, with a protagonist who somehow manages to be both sympathetic and loathsome and a plot that is intricate and suspenseful. The novel may remind some readers of Donald Westlake’s The Hook (2000) or, perhaps, The Ax (1997), both of which tackle the theme of ordinary men who resort to murder to solve a problem. --David Pitt --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged Lib Ed; Library edition (July 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1423367731
• ISBN-13: 978-1423367734
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars exciting thriller, July 19, 2008

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: At First Sight: A Novel of Obsession (Hardcover)

Fifty-five years old Chick Best has run an Internet business for the past dozen years; however recently competition from the global chains threatens to bury him. The affluent Los Angelino is married to philandering Evelyn; though she cheats on him he thanks God for that. He is concerned with his sixteen year old daughter Melissa who knows more drugs personally than any pharmaceutical company.

Chick and his two indifferent towards him women go to Hawaii on vacation. When he sees newlywed Paige Ellis emerge from the Maui hotel swimming pool, Chick finds himself in love at first sight. He insures he meets the object of his adult rated fantasy and to his chagrin, her spouse Chandler though he is cleverly nice to the man in his way. Back in the Forty-eight states, Chick is on a business trip to New York, but instead of going home he heads to Charlotte where the Ellis couple lives. There he accidentally runs over Chandler several times to eliminate the only person in the way of happily ever after with his obsession.

This is an exciting thriller with morbid dry humor as Chick allows his fixation for his love interest to get control of head as if his brain had one icon: Paige. The story line is told by the prime players, for the most part Chick. Although somewhat satirical, the reaction of Chandler's family including to a lesser degree his new wife seems too indifferent (especially when they learn how they died) even though that purposely contrasts their apathy to his killer's passion. Still Stephen J. Cannell provides readers with a fascinating "novel of obsession".

Harriet Klausner

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Gross, Self-Absorbed Materialist Decides He Has to Have the "Perfect" Woman, September 19, 2008

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: At First Sight: A Novel of Obsession (Hardcover)

Chick Best isn't anyone you are going to like. That's one of the problems with this book. An even bigger problem is that what Chick does will more often disgust you than interest you. Beyond that, much of the story is predictable . . . so there isn't much to look forward to . . . except the book being over.

Even if you are a big Stephen J. Cannell fan, you may not like this book. You can definitely skip it unless you feel like you need to read every word he's ever written.

Chick Best is seeing his dot-com business go down the tubes when the family's annual trip to a tony resort on Maui makes him angrier than usual at his wife. While grouching to himself about her unreasonable demands, Chick is jolted out of his bad mood by a glimpse of a gorgeous young woman. At first, he hopes she's single. By staring and eavesdropping, Chick learns she's married. Chick can't help himself. He's got to have her. How will he do it?

From there, Chick's life comes to narrow down onto being with Paige Ellis. Nothing will get in his way.

At First Sight appears to have been intended to be a comic satire about how middle-aged men falter through trying to reverse the effects of time. I compared the book at first to some of the more extreme works of that Florida philosopher, Carl Hiaasen. But Hiaasen maintains a light touch that keeps the reader wondering what prank the author will pull next. Mr. Cannell by comparison is like the butcher who sticks his thumb on the scale to make a bigger sale; he gets your attention in an expensive way.

I find it hard to imagine a woman I know who would like this book. If seeing a man destroy anything that gets in his way appeals to you, you'll like this book a lot more than I did.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A lot of people are not going to like this novel, October 8, 2008

By 

J. Norburn (Quesnel, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: At First Sight: A Novel of Obsession (Hardcover)

A lot of people aren't going to like At First Sight. A big reason for this is that the central character is a self absorbed, intolerant, jerk. Personally, I like novels with flawed, even detestable characters, as long as they are interesting and/or entertaining.

This is one of two significant drawbacks to the novel. Chick is boring as hell. He's superficial and whiny. It's always risky for an author to build a novel around a character who is unlikeable, and I have to admire Cannell for trying. I suspect a lot of people will give up on this novel about of the third of the way through (probably about the time Chick gratifies himself with a Hustler magazine in his car after killing someone) because they were either bored to death by Chick or just found him too unpleasant to read about. I think Cannell would have been more successful in his attempt if he had been able to incorporate a little morbid humor into the narrative in the first half. With the right tone, creepy behavior can become darkly funny.

And this happens to a degree in the final third of the novel (for those willing to stick with it). The narrative alternates between Chick and the woman he is obsessed with, and there is some morbid humor in the stark contrast between his perspective and hers. His thought process and behavior becomes more and more outrageous and delusional near the end and this adds to the entertainment value.

The second significant shortcoming of the novel is its lack of originality. For some reason, Cannell seems to think that he is writing something groundbreaking here. He says friends begged him not to write the novel, that he'd been harboring the idea for years and that it simply poured out of him when he started to write, as if it were something unique and special. It isn't. The novel's premise, a man becomes obsessed with another man's wife and then kills him so he can romance the widow is not new. Frankly the whole thing is a tired re-tread. I think the only semi-original idea here is that Cannell made Chick uncompromisingly unlikeable, and wrote most of the novel from his point of view.

On a positive note, the novel is lean and mean, and Cannell does a reasonable job of building suspense in the final chapters. I started to find Chick's antics reasonably entertaining near the end and appreciated the alternating narratives. I like that Paige, the object of his obsession, is a reasonably intelligent and resourceful woman. Her guilt and grief make her vulnerable and leads to some choices that put her at risk, but for the most part, she see's Chick for what he is.

While there are some positives to the novel, it isn't one I can recommend without reservations (if at all). The story is predictable and lacks originality and Chick's rants remind me of a loudmouth drunk in a bar that you wish would move to another stool. If you're thinking about giving up halfway through, I can tell you that it does get better, but only marginally. 2 ½ stars.