The Wild Card: A Novel [Hardcover]

Mark Joseph (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2001

Four grown men, friends since childhood-a man of though, a man of leisure, an outlaw, and a cop-reunite in San Francisco for a weekend-long game of cards in the Palace Hotel's Enrico Caruso Suite. Every year they do this. It gives them a chance to catch up, to renew their friendships, to relive their glory days. To smoke, drink, laugh, and lose themselves and their cares for a couple of days. It also allows them to reaffirm, by unspoken consent, that the deadly secret they share has remained safe for another year.

Thirty years earlier, there were five friends. Just out of high school, preparing for college, optimistic and energetic, they took a boat trip up a river. Then an outburst of drunken teenage savagery at a place called Shanghai Bend left four boys scrambling to cover their tracks. And a fifth, Bobby McCorkle, disappeared...

For thirty years Bobby drifted aimlessly: through the firefights of Vietnam, across the United States and back a hundred times, and into every numbed recess of his conscience that heroin and alcohol could take him. He survived by his wits, but he lived by his trade: he became a gambler.

In 1995 construction crews dig up a skeleton at Shanghai Bend. Now McCorkle must rejoin his old pals at the card table and confront their secret together. What does each man bring? How much does each know? And how far will each go to protect the secret? The game begins, the stakes go up. Will they be exposed? Will their lives be ruined? Bluff. Double bluff. Call. Before the weekend is over, these five men will find themselves playing for their lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Poker," thinks Bobby McCorkle, "is monotonous, routine work." Unfortunately, the same might be said of Joseph's repetitive, disappointing and cynical fifth novel (Deadline Y2K; To Kill the Potemkin). One summer night in 1963, Bobby and his four closest friends from high school Alex, Dean, Nelson and Charlie along with Sally, a beautiful 16-year-old runaway, boat along the Sacramento Valley's Feather River, drinking and playing cards. Before the night ends, Sally is dead, and the lives of the five young men have been irrevocably altered. Bobby, once bound to study at Berkeley, decides instead to enlist and heads straight for Vietnam. The other four begin to meet every year, mostly to play high-stakes poker, but also to prove to themselves that their awful secret is still safe. When Sally's remains are discovered in May 1995, the four, after decades of trying, finally convince Bobby their "wild card" to return for the game. A professional poker player, Bobby is drawn by the possibility of a big score, but he also wants to hear the others' versions of what happened on the banks of the Feather. Like characters in a sort of lightweight Rashomon, each player has a different take. The only thing they do agree upon is that the time has come for a price to be paid. Most of the novel takes place around a card table, and with Joseph's less-than-subtle, workmanlike style, the conversation isn't exactly engaging. The characters are badly drawn types, the ending is easily predictable and clich‚s and sloppy constructions abound. Though Joseph clearly knows poker, his book has as many weak joists as a house of cards. (Aug.)Forecast: Fold.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The author's fifth novel features five men playing poker in a hotel room, talking over old times. Sounds kind of dull, but, in fact, the story is quite exciting, building to an intense, dramatic conclusion. The reader quickly realizes that these guys aren't just strolling down memory lane; they're unearthing a long-buried secret, finally letting themselves discover what really happened 30 years ago when five boys met a pretty girl. The author reveals the long-ago goings-on slowly, taking us back in time as the poker players discuss the secret they've been keeping inside for three decades, letting us watch the events that shattered their young lives. This isn't the most original of ideas--there have been plenty of stories about people who share an old secret--but Joseph gives the notion new life with a well-executed plot, well-drawn characters, and genuine suspense. A solid thriller. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (August 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261209
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261207
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,446,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Not quite a winning hand, November 5, 2001

By 

Jeffrey Ellis "bored recluse" (Richardson, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wild Card: A Novel (Hardcover)

Five childhood friends live their lives obsessed by poker and haunted by a secret tragedy. Every year, four of them get together for a weekend-long reunion in San Fransisco where they play an epic game of poker and relive their youths. Only one -- Bobby McCorkle -- has refused to attend these games until finally, the details of that hidden tragedy threaten to bubble to the surface. This year, Bobby attends the game and, over the course of one chaotic weekend, the truth is finally revealed. Its a good premise for a thriller but Mark Joseph's The Wild Card ends up promising more than it delivers.

Probably the most important element of any thriller are creating credible, believable characters. If you can buy the characters and their motivations, even the most improbable of twists can be accepted. Unfortunately, with the exception of Bobby and occasionally gambling addicted Alex, the main characters never really stand out from each other. Each is given one trait to set them apart (one is gay, another Chinese) but otherwise, they're basically interchangeable. Since very little seems to be happening inside the characters (and most of their dialouge feels forced and leaden), the book's attempts at creating a psychological thriller fall flat. As well, the deep, dark secret should be obvious to most readers as soon as they read the first chapter. With a few noteable exceptions, the book lacks a certain element of surprise that a succesful thriller needs to keep the reader on the edge of his seat.

That said, there are also a few elements that work quite well. The author is, himself, a poker player and the game scenes crackle with a vibrancy that the rest of the book lacks. (Though, by the end, his oft-repeated message that poker represents the twists and turns of life starts to feel just a bit heavy handed and forced.) Though he's hardly a master of prose, Joseph is a good story teller and the book is a quick read. Even if it didn't enthrall me, the Wild Card certainly didn't bore me either. As well, the ending's final twist, if a little improbable (as most final twists are), is a genuine surprise and does stick in the reader's mind after he finishes the book. On the whole, an uneven thriller that certainly has its moments. One could do worse when looking for a book to pass a rainy afternoon with.

4.0 out of 5 stars The Perfect Book For Guys To Bond With, September 11, 2001

By 

"troytron" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wild Card: A Novel (Hardcover)

Joseph's new book, "The Wild card," finds the author taking an interesting break from his usual techno-thriller style of writing and exploring new territory as a spinner of more broadly accessible suspense yarns. The result is a rather winning piece of work, at least in terms of storytelling. First of all, the whole book has a sort of Americana, meat-and-potatoes ambience in terms of its writing--Joseph brings to mind Stephen King's knack for evoking eras, places, and events in the recent American past and in the present, and the ability to capture the straightforward emotions of individual characters embroiled in those "snapshots of time,"--especially in somewhat questionable, shady situations.The feel reminds me of King's short story "The Body," upon which "Stand By me" was based, and this is a favorable comparison, obviously. The book starts right off the bat with suspense; within two pages Joseph conjures the indelible image of a busy riverside suburb in northern California--an image suddenly twisted by the problematic discovery of a skeleton. 'The Wild Card' is a character-driven tale, so it helps that the reader can't help but take a liking to the very first character Joseph draws: a female bulldozer operator who discovers the bones and is forced to take a ten-minute cigarette break in the cab of her vehicle, pondering in the workday heat while her inner-moral compass decides whether to report the finding or simply "ditch" the cadaver and keep her paycheck secure. Being, as Joseph describes, "an honest sort," she spills the beans and sets in motion the typically American brand of frantic investigative activity that usually leads to the suspicion of foul play. Now, the stage is set for the heart of the story: five men with a potentially shattering secret in their pre-Vietnam era past--four of these men still meet annually for a raucous poker game in a San Francisco hotel suite, but ONE of the former clique, a near-vagabond gambling addict named Bobby, has ostracized himself from his friends' yearly revelries. Trust me: he has good reason. However, with the grisly discovery, the jig is suddenly up and Joseph successfully creates the tense, charged atmosphere of an almost ritualistic poker gathering. Instead of halting their good time, the discovery of the skeleton brings this bunch of guys together in a palpably tense, almost frightening manner. Joseph's writing is effective enough here that you almost want to reach in and wipe the sweat from their foreheads. What each of them has to reveal about their recollection of poor Sally (and her long-ago fate) seems designed by the author to show the nature of the tricky business we might call "individual human perspective." Of course, card game imagery is "shuffled" into the plot at a number of turns, but it doesn't come off as being too contrived because Joseph is sort of churning toward a conclusion that brings these images into union with his number one image: *THE* wild card--poor, enigmatic Bobby McCorkle. Obviously, the story whips up the suspense quotient at a swift pace, and the whole point is to make you salivate for the conclusion (and believe me, you do). Also of note:the San Francisco setting is used to extremely good effect throughout the tale--if the author is planning another thriller set in the city by the bay, then that is good news, because his particular vision of San Francisco grabs. On a very minor note, the dialogue of Joseph's characters can be inexplicably clunky, but only on a few occasions, and their use of profanity is often so gratuitous as to be genuinely irritating and too contrived. This book is, without question, the ideal read for a man who wants to kick back in his easy chair after a hard-day's work, drink a Scotch (or a Bud), and sink into a fast-paced, gripping tale about five other guys who are knee-deep in some potentially serious manure ...basically,this book has "guy" written all over it. It's hard to find a man who hasn't taken part in the thrill of a poker game at some time or another, so "Wild card" is probably the best book out right now to buy as a gift for a man--whether he reads a great deal or not. Buy it, and watch how easy it is for your husband or boyfriend to really bond with a book.

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT BOOK: Mark McKechnie review of Wild Card, September 6, 2001

By 

mark mckechnie (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wild Card: A Novel (Hardcover)

Picked up this book before a business flight to & from London.

Planned to sleep on the flight -- no chance. Read half on the way there, and half on the way back (of course in lieu of getting any work done!).

Book a great combination of suspense, nostalgia / innocence (san francisco in the early 60's -- between the beat-nicks and hippy phase), and intellect.

Story about a group of teenagers who formed a poker group in the early 60's. Went their own way after a "final hurrah" weekend went awry. Makes you think how chance events can affect your entire life. The parallel of "life as a poker game" strikes home given my involvement in the stock market.

Highly recommended.

Ending will leave you surprised but wondering.