You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps [Paperback]

Tom Holt (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Hodder Audio (2007)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B001W5MVZO
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, January 29, 2007

By 

KatyM (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here but It Helps (Hardcover)

This is a good one.

A semi-serious caveat: Tom Holt always seems to be writing madly toward deadline,so that he only has time to sketch in the end of his books. So, his ends are often well-worked out, but the characterization and humor of the first 4/5ths of the book fade away.

That's the case with this one. Great twists, great premise, good characters, excellent description, some very funny jokes. But the complicated plot deserves a more fully-realized conclusion, not people explaining things to each other for twenty pages. A few more "seeds" could have planted earlier to suggest the completely out of nowhere meaning of the tree (this isn't a spoiler, we meet the tree at the end of chapter 1). The story wraps up really well, but it's practically a set piece.

But it's still worth reading. (See, I gave it four stars!) Tom Holt is really talented and he's not the only obscenely prolific author to blast through the final pages of his novels to meet some deadline or other.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as Holt's other stuff., June 14, 2007

By 

Robert Herzfeld - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps (Paperback)

This return to J. W. Wells & Co with new employees and clients is not nearly as good as the earlier books. The story seems a little re-tread and most of the characters are flat and uninteresting. Pretty disappointing considering how much I enjoyed the others.

May be worth reading just to complete the set. But then again maybe not.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Reliably fun comic fantasy, March 2, 2007

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here but It Helps (Hardcover)

Tom Holt continues to publish delightful comic fantasies. His latest novels include a few about J. W. Wells & Co., a fairly typical bureaucratically fouled up firm, which happens to deal in magic. (The firm's name of course points to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer.) As this latest story opens, the struggling firm has been bought out. The new owners are a mystery - but business more or less as usual continues. In particular, a new employee, Cassie Clay, is putting the final touches on a deal to save a widget factory, Hollingshead and Farren, at the cost of the owner's soul. The owner's son, Colin Hollingshead, wonders what is going on while he tries to think of a way to escape the boring job he was born to. But then he and Cassie realize, to their mutual disgust, that they are reincarnations of star-crossed lovers, and that for the sake of the universe, they must be together. But they can't stand each other! Will J. W. Wells's love philtre do the trick? Or is something more sinister going on? Perhaps the veteran employees of Wells, perhaps their most reliable workers, Connie Schwartz-Alberich and Benny Shumway, can figure out what's really going on ... It's all quite funny.

Holt has a great time satirizing business missteps, against the backdrop of the Bank of the Dead, and deals with the devil, other traditional magical devices. The plot is intricate and I'm not sure it really makes sense but Holt talks a good game and surprises the reader fairly often. The romantic leads aren't terribly romantic but they are amusing. This isn't a great novel but it's reliable fun.