- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Picador (Feb 2 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312429312
- ISBN-13: 978-0312429317
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14.6 x 1.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 249 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,379,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Sly and satiric . . . Peyton Place in the age of terror and twitter."--Joseph Salvatore, The New York Times Book Review
"Amidon once again displays his unerring facility for sniffing out the shaky foundations of our lives."--Stewart O'Nan, The Washington Post
"Reading Security is a bit like waking up at four in the morning and surveying familiar bedroom objects in--literally--a new light. . . . Good fences may make good neighbors, but bad neighbors make better novels."--Molly Young, The New York Observer
"A gripping account of scandal and fear in outer suburbia."--Financial Times
"With his dry ironies and his skill in probing beneath the comfortable veneer of his characters' lives, Amidon tells us more than many writers with greater pretensions. . . . Beneath the surface of his subtle and absorbing narrative lurk paranoia and the refusal to face up to disquieting truths."--Nick Rennison, The Sunday Times (London)
"A gripping account of scandal and fear in outer suburbia."--Financial Times
"With his dry ironies and his skill in probing beneath the comfortable veneer of his characters' lives, Amidon tells us more than many writers with greater pretensions. . . . Beneath the surface of his subtle and absorbing narrative lurk paranoia and the refusal to face up to disquieting truths."--Nick Rennison, The Sunday Times (London)
Praise for Human Capital
“A gripping, troubling, and incisive portrait of the way we live now . . . Has the ambitious sweep and narrative power of a nineteenth-century novel.” —Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children
“Like Rosellen Brown’s Before and After and Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, Human Capital grounds [its] plot in meticulously observed social details, its relentless pacing in some shrewd psychological insights. And Mr. Amidon proves himself a nimble storyteller, providing the reader with a solid, literate and consistently compelling tale.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Amidon’s novel is a wonderfully wicked satire on a twenty-first-century gilded age . . . His book is more than just one family’s story. It’s a portrait of a whole society caught in a dead end that everyone insists will lead somewhere after all.” —Michael Shelden, Chicago Tribune
“Amidon has achieved the rare alchemy of creating a novel charged with suspense from the lives of ordinary suburban families; it’s also an unflinching social commentary that has the potential to endure as a clear and literate portrait of its time.” —Stephanie Merritt, The Observer (London)
Product Description
There isn't much crime in Stoneleigh, Massachusetts, a college town, a mountain getaway for the quietly rich. So when Edward Inman, owner of Stoneleigh Sentinel security, gets a late-night alarm from the home of one of his wealthiest clients, Doyle Cutler, he does a routine check and thinks nothing more of it—until a local student claims that she was sexually assaulted that night at Cutler’s house.
Edward soon finds himself drawn into the girl's story, and his investigation leads him to his old girlfriend, whose teenage son may know the truth about what happened that night. Security is a timely, wry, and riveting story of adults and children, secret lives and civic culture, suspicion and sexual hysteria.
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Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.6 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astute Observations, April 15 2009
By Cary B. Barad - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Security (Paperback)
I had very high expectations of the author of the well-received, "Human Capital" and I wasn't disappointed. Au contraire. This novel covers many themes well: politics, adultery, class snobbery, law enforcement, parenting, real estate, addictions and deep emotional conflicts in a small but developing suburban college town. To our benefit, the characters are well-drawn and true-to-life--they all have interesting stories to tell us-with a good dose of mystery and suspense.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Insecure, Jun 9 2009
By Stephen T. Hopkins - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Security (Paperback)
Stephen Amidon's new novel, Security, explores many aspects of personal insecurity and the ways in which each of us remains fundamentally insecure, no matter how strong we've made our defenses. Protagonist Edward Inman owns a security company and leads a comfortable life in Massachusetts with his wife, Meg, an alderman running for mayor. Their relationship has become loveless, and after Ed reconnects with his old flame, Kathryn, recently divorced, he becomes involved in her life and issues, crumbling the already weak foundations of his own. A broader cast of characters, most of whom are unlikeable for one reason or another, exhibit behaviors that disclose the range of ways in which we try to overcome the insecurity that we want to hide from others. Amidon's writing is superb, and this satire of modern life and relationships can be read with detachment or with an identification with one or more of the behaviors these characters as we try to find happiness or acceptance with others. Security is a timely novel by a talented writer.Rating: Three-star (Recommended)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Kathryn had learned that the small favors were as likely to be denied as the big ones.", Jan 18 2010
By Luan Gaines "luansos" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Security (Paperback)
Secrets and lies are at the heart of Amidon's effective novel, the drama of public accusation and private revenge in the sleepy college town of Stoneleigh, Massachusetts, when Mary Steckl accuses a wealthy local man of attacking her one night at his luxurious estate. Unfortunately for Mary, her father, Walt, is an object of derision since an electrical accident cause irreversible damage to his body. Since the death of his wife from cancer a few years earlier, Walt's drinking has kept him in the public scrutiny. A student at Mt. Stoneleigh College, Mary is a quiet girl, but her accusations bring out a pettiness in her fellow students that burns like a forest fire. Soon everyone takes a side, Mary's credulity hampered by her father's very public blunders.The story is told primarily through the perspective of Edward Inman, owner of Stoneleigh Security, a private security business that has prospered from the increased paranoia of average citizens. It is Edward who first realizes something is amiss at the home of Doyle Cutler, when he responds to a so-called false alarm and later picks up a stumbling, inebriated Connor Williams walking away from Doyle's estate. Connor is the son of Inman's former lover, Kathryn, a woman Edward has been unable to purge from his life and heart in spite of his best intentions. Then there is the charismatic professor, Stuart Symes, who is having an affair with one of his bright students and is teaching a class Mary attends in creative writing. Stuart is somehow connected to the current scandal, a situation that imperils his reputation and case for tenure and outrages his students.
Amidon skillfully blends these disparate characters in a believable plot of small town life where controversy breeds passionate responses and gossip spreads without regard to accuracy. Something is terribly wrong in Stoneleigh, important men's reputations on the line, Mary caught in the middle, her innocence forfeit as the stories swirl unabated and Doyle protects himself from scandal. From Edward's loveless marriage to Mary's motherless home, the author captures the uneasy tensions of daily dramas and the controversy that brings scandal to the surface in a small town. Lives are irrevocably changed, hysteria rampant, the truth as elusive as a man without an opinion. Luan Gaines/2010.
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