Word: crokers
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Across the continent, in Oakland, Calif., Charlie's decision falls like doom on Conrad Hensley, 23, the married father of two who has a $14-an-hour job on the night shift hauling frozen food out of a Croker Global warehouse to waiting delivery trucks. Conrad is someone new in a Wolfe novel, a totally good person who wants nothing more out of life than to buy a modest condominium for his family and establish a well-ordered, bourgeois existence. After the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a 0[degree]F freezer unit--here the competition is nonexistent...
...series of related subplots, conveyed through the thoughts of three other characters. Raymond Peepgass, 46, a senior loan officer at PlannersBanc, has an inside view of Charlie's financial mess and thinks he may be able to dip surreptitiously into all that sloshing debt. Then there is Martha Croker, 53, still reeling from the breakup of her nearly 30-year marriage to Charlie. Now that she is no longer seen on the arm of her husband, her old Atlanta friends no longer see her, "a superfluous woman...
...Fareek is also a local Atlanta boy who climbed to fame from a poor black neighborhood. And he has now been accused, though not yet formally charged, of date rape by the daughter of one of Atlanta's most powerful white businessmen, Inman Armholster, who happens to be Charlie Croker's closest friend...
...rumors are out there already; a local Internet gossip sheet is adding new details almost daily. Quickly, the city's white business interests and black leadership huddle and come up with a plan. The only person who can defuse or at least damp down this problem is...Charlie Croker...
...heard, trains are still running between there and Baltimore. Why not come see me?' I did, and we talked a lot over the phone, and by early April I was back to normal." But the memory of Wolfe's trying time is echoed in the new novel, when Charlie Croker, observing his at-risk Atlanta mansion and grounds bathed in sunlight, shrinks from the sight and thinks, "The depressed man longs for heavy clouds, fog, mist, chilly weather, downpours, hail...