You probably think that I only review crime novels, books about soccer, and books about blogs. That’s not entirely true: I also review novels about blogs.

I’m reading Jeremy Blachman’s Anonymous Lawyer (Holt). Blachman writes a popular blog called Anonymous Lawyer, with tales told from the point-of-view of “a fictional hiring partner at a large law firm in a major city.” The book, perhaps not suprisingly, is also written from the point-of-view of a fictional hiring partner at a law firm in a major city.

I’m a professional book reviewer, so obviously I would never judge a book before I started reading it, but I took one look at this book and prepared myself to not like it. It’s about lawyers, for one, and I would argue that the world needs another novel about lawyers as much as it needs another movie about how charming people are in small Irish towns.

Also, it’s written in the form of a blog and e-mails. The epistolary novel occupies a small but lofty niche in the annals of literature, but its progeny, the e-mail novel, died a quick and deserving death. A blog novel seemed like, well, couldn’t you just write a blog?

But then I remembered that I’m a blogger, too, and that, while I’m not a lawyer, when I was a teenager my parents often judged my oral arguments to be worthy of a courtroom. So I decided to give in and be prepared to either dislike or like Anonymous Lawyer.

It’s funny. Really funny.

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Over the weekend I read the new Jason Starr novel, Lights Out. I’ve been a bit critical of Starr in the past. In my review of the anthology Plots with Guns I called him “middling.” Other Booklist reviewers have been mixed. Frank Sennett wrote that Twisted City was “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac.” But Stephanie Zvirin called Starr, in her review of Tough Luck, “relentlessly clever.” And Joanne Wilkinson said, of Nothing Personal, “his deadpan tone is a perfect match for his material.”

(If you want to read those reviews but you aren’t a subscriber to Booklist Online, click here to sign up for a free trial.)

Is his work uneven, or does Starr have the misfortune of having too many reviewers? Booklist editors do generally try to keep authors with the same reviewers to provide some continuity, but that’s not always possible. Reviewers come and go and are sometimes even allowed to take vacations. Also, authors who are well-reviewed tend to find regular reviewers more easily than those who aren’t - authors who receive middling reviews get passed around following the supply of available labor.

Conversely, some authors probably don’t want to be stuck with the same reviewer - I’ve reviewed most Ken Bruen’s books, but his only starred reviews have come from Emily Melton (for London Boulevard) and David Wright (for The Magdalen Martyrs).

We do our subjective best to be objective but it’s all relative. And whether an author’s oeuvre is reviewed by committee or by a single reviewer, it’s still not always easy to say with certainty whether the author is getting better or just getting better reviews.

I really enjoyed Lights Out, for instance. The story of a superstar baseball player and his unlucky former high-school teammate (his Tommy John surgery couldn’t cure his love of the curveball), it has the usual Starr elements: unlikeable, self-interested losers who make one bad decision after another. This one just seems funnier and more insightful than usual, but it also has a broader scope, and even includes moments of sympathy for a few characters. Theoretically I’d know if those elements were missing before - which I think they were - but if I was simply finally in the mood for Starr, maybe I looked harder for supporting evidence this time.

Here are three funny sentences that I underlined, all having to do with J.T., the superstar, and his desire to prevent bad publicity from a possible statutory-rape charge by setting a wedding date with his high-school sweetheart, Christina:

Of course, he’d make her sign a prenup in case the marriage fell apart, but it was still good to know that their love was real. 

And, discussing his fiancee’s lack of an intense fitness regimen:

It was still a nice ass, an above-average ass, but once they got married he’d have to watch it closely. 

Lastly, regarding his desire to finally plan the wedding, he says to Christina:

“But now that we’re older and more mature and whatever, I’m ready to do it.” 

J.T.’s churlish assessment of Christina’s posterior - which becomes an obsession for him - is funny for the way it reveals his utter lack of depth, but it’s the word “whatever” in the last quote that kills me, as if, even in the act of wooing, he’s too lazy to think of a third reason that now is the right time to wed.

While Starr has a good eye and an ability to bring to life a truly diverse cast of inner-city strugglers, strivers, and schemers - there are the faintest echoes of George Pelecanos and Richard Price - this isn’t much more than entertainment. But for people who like a wicked sense of humor and don’t need to identify with the characters, this is very good entertainment.

(Incidentally, add Lights Out to the Bumbling Criminals list.)

Back to the central question. If, as a reviewer, I warm to a writer I haven’t always liked, is the writer getting better or am I just liking the writer better?

Book reviewers don’t get paid for ambiguity and soul-searching (hell, we barely get paid at all), so, obviously, the writer is getting better.

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I finished reading William Brodrick’s The Gardens of the Dead today at lunch and then spent an inordinate amount of time puzzling over what seemed to be contradictory events in the ending. Everything made sense, and then it didn’t, but all the characters were acting as if everything still made sense. I even went into Bill’s office and hashed it out with him: “The first 333 pages are brilliant, and then there’s this bizarre, I don’t know, is it some kind of sophisticated parable?”

I’m sorry I can’t be more specific, but, you know, spoilers.

I wasn’t sure whether: a) the galley had been printed from a draft in which the ending was in the process of being rewritten, and parts of both endings were still extant; b) Brodrick had attempted an audacious literary trick and failed; or c) Brodrick had pulled off an audacious literary trick and I was too dumb to understand it.

I read the last 35 pages again. And then again. This bizarre disconnect, it seemed, hinged on just a few sentences. How could everything seem so normal - all the characters’ arcs were perfectly described except for this one instance of unreality - when something so weird was going on?

And then I found it, a single sentence that I had misread three times. Brodrick had indeed played a little trick, writing a scene that appeared as if it ended one way, then a few pages later given a clever explanation as to what had actually happened. Most readers will probably arrive at this moment with an “Ah!” or a nod, or a smile - unless they are like me, so determined to find evidence for the improbable that they miss the explanation for the obvious.

Again, I’m sorry that I can’t be more specific. I just thought I’d share a mysterious example of mystery-reviewing detective work. Only I’m the bumbling detective who keeps misreading the clues.

But I told you I’m tired.

No posts ’til next Tuesday. I’m going to kick off Memorial Day weekend tomorrow with an activity that everyone will agree is the perfect way to herald the approach of summer: spending the day in a poolroom.

No, I don’t mean reading while sleeping - although if I could do that, my problems would be solved. With two young sons waking up at staggered intervals throughout the night (who then wake up the cats, but that’s another story), I often find myself feeling too sleepy to read. Of course, with constant deadlines, putting the book aside for another day isn’t always an option. Sometimes I feel like I’m in college again: I was once foolish enough (or brave enough or show-offy enough) to register for both The American Novel and The Victorian Novel in the same semester, forcing me to read Moby-Dick and Our Mutual Friend simultaneously. (Strange that I still liked those novels….)

Right now I’m reading William Brodrick’s The Gardens of the Dead in fits and starts, stealing time at lunch and on the train, and of course reading until my eyes droop at night. I loved his first novel, The 6th Lamentation, and this one is probably better. A stately pace, subtly shaded moral inquisitions, and a complex plot make this all the more challenging for a sleep-deprived reviewer, but it’s a testament to Brodrick’s talent that he can hold my attention even when I can barely hold my eyes open. There are many ways I can tell a book is excellent, such as when it’s not the kind of book I would have chosen for myself but I am unable to put it down anyway. A book that keeps me awake when I’m dead tired is another. In theory it would be impossible to fall asleep while reading anything but, though the spirit is willing, the flesh is often weak.

In fact, if I did have a problem falling asleep when presented with the opportunity for doing so, I can think of a couple of titles that would make nice sleeping pills. Finnegan’s Wake seems too obvious, and yet…

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. 

…yawn…

Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. 

Zzzz….

Sifting through coverage of Book Expo America (BEA), held over the weekend in Washington, D.C. - I stayed home, in the warm, sticky-fingered embrace of my family - it seems that a main topic of conversation was Kevin Kelly’s recent article “Scan This Book!” in the New York Times.

Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired, and his vision is of a modern version of the Great Library of Alexandria, where all texts known to humanity are not only available online, but are extensively tagged and hyperlinked - a chance for the geeks to one-up the Greeks.

I’ll leave it for others to explain and argue the merits and demerits of copyright law vis-a-vis Google’s ambitious book-scanning project. The topic has been well documented in both online and print media. But one aspect of Kelly’s argument resonates with what I was writing about yesterday. Discussing how the publishing industry might change in response to the rise of niche markets, I made an analogy to how a grassroots approach is changing the music industry.

Kelly, writing about what might happen as copies of books are devalued by digitization, also makes an analogy to music. If books are scanned and easily swappable, as has happened with ripped songs and filesharing, this new universal library might work something like an iTunes playlist:

At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or “playlists,” as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual “bookshelves” - a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. 

As somebody desperate to carve out fifteen minutes of “me time,” I think I’ll have to rely on others to create these bookshelves (I don’t have time to organize playlists, either - I either listen to albums or hit shuffle), but it’s a nice idea. If you were interested in, oh, say, pool and billiards, wouldn’t it be nice to stumble across someone’s carefully researched reference library? Unless, of course, you had written a book on pool and found your effort available for free download.

Addressing writers’ need to make a living, Kelly again draws, I think, on what’s happening in the music business. As filesharing chips away at the primacy of the CD, some artists - who didn’t get much money from royalties anyway - have released their hold on copies of their music, retooling their business models to make the bulk of their money from concert tickets and T-shirts. Writes Kelly:

As copies have been dethroned, the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work. Authors and artists can make (and have made) their livings selling aspects of their works other than inexpensive copies of them. They can sell performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions - in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the “discovery tool” that markets these other intangible valuables. 

John Updike, for the defense, disagrees. And it’s true that there is a key difference. Musicians have always charged money for performances in addition to recordings and merchandise. Writers traditionally perform for free in order to promote sales of their books. Kelly’s idea that “users will earn prestige and perhaps income” for “curating an excellent collection” of articles and book pages might be upsetting to some of the people who have actually written those articles and book pages.

But to Kelly, lost sales are only the problem of a few elite writers:

While a few best-selling authors fear piracy, every author fears obscurity. 

Probably true, but not every writer has the time to explore and establish alternate revenue streams. Most writing pays poorly already - must it now be pro bono?

If you haven’t read Kelly’s article already, you should. Whether you’re enraptured or enraged by his vision, it’s something we should all be talking about. It’s quite possible that, just as with the Great Library of Songs, the new Great Library of Pages will happen whether we agree to it or not.

Last Friday, publish-on-demand (POD, or traditionally, “self-publishing”) service Lulu.com released a study claiming that the life expectancy of the bestselling novel has plummeted.

Notes the study:

In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; last year, 23 did. 

Basically, they’re counting the number of weeks a novel stays at number one, so I’m not sure that it necessarily gives us the data we need about the true life expectancy of a novel, which I would define as how long it stays in the zeitgeist. The longest The Da Vinci Code stayed at number one was 13 weeks, for example, which isn’t a good indicator of its cultural dominance (it’s been back to #1 on 15 other occasions, for shorter runs).

Still, we’re not seeing any streaks like Allen Drury’s political thriller Advise and Consent, which stayed at #1 for 57 weeks. It would be hard to argue with Lulu.com CEO Bob Young when he says:

“The market today is more chaotic,” says Young. “The churn rate is far higher.” 

With more and more distractions competing for our attention - in the 1960s, for example, people didn’t start their workdays at YouTube - it’s no wonder our attention spans have become shorter. This also seems on the money to me:

The future of publishing, he continues, belongs to “niche-busters” - books targeting a niche rather than mass market. 

Certainly in other fields of publishing and entertainment, the trend is toward “narrowcasting” - getting more stuff to smaller audiences. Using TV as an example, in the 1970s, three big networks broadcasted some pretty bland fare to huge swaths of America. Thirty years later we have hundreds of channels that deliver a wide variety of bland fare. Presumably, it’s easier to find your kind of thing on TV now. (I’m still waiting for the Noir Channel, but home-shopping enthusiasts have it made.)

Of course, Young’s take on their stats is that “the publishing industry is unravelling” and that self-published books will fill the gap. I’m not so sure about that. Having examined a lot of the self-published books that come through our doors, I think the reading public still demands the kind of quality they can get from a professionally written and edited book. Not to say there aren’t always some exceptions; I’m sure there are a few self-published books that are cliche-busters.

But who knows what will happen? The DIY approach has made for some fascinating changes in the music industry, as technology allows more and more musicians to eschew major-label serfdom to record and distribute their own music. And blogs speak to a self-publishing revolution of another sort. Maybe the POD-people will become a stronger force in book publishing as well. I’d imagine it will come less from individual authors using POD and more from small would-be publishers using the flexibility of POD to create tiny niche publishing houses - some of which we’re already seeing.

I hope that big bestsellers don’t go the way of the dodo, though. Even though I’m sick of talking about The Da Vinci Code, I think we all still need to have the same book in common sometimes.

It probably seems as if I only review crime novels and books about soccer. But I’m much more versatile than that. I also review…wait for it…books about blogs!

I’m currently reading Blog Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policy, Public Relations, and Legal Issues, by Nancy Flynn (AMACOM), which is a lot sexier than it sounds. Wait, no it isn’t. It’s pretty dry stuff. But, given the exponentially multiplying potential for exposure that businesses face - from e-mail to instant messaging to blogs - some dry books like this are going to be necessary if you’re one of the suits.

Flynn notes:

Blog Rule #4: It’s the casual, conversational, anything-goes nature of the blog that makes it both so appealing to blog writers and readers - and so potentially dangerous to business. 

As a blog writer, I am much more in favor of anything-goes, but I understand that people with money to protect have different priorities. In neatly ordered chapters, with plenty of recaps and action plans, Flynn helps readers decide first of all of blogging can benefit their business, and if so, how to do it in a way that’s safe for business.

My favorite part so far is when she suggests creating a blog management team that includes some or all of the following: blog czar, senior executive, legal counsel and compliance officer, records manager, human resources manager, chief information officer, public relations manager, customer service manager, and training professional. Nothing like a nine-person team to keep things spontaneous!

To be fair, Flynn acknowledges repeatedly that businesses need to make sure their blogs offer some real personality if they want to make meaningful contact with their customers. I think that the words “management team” are anathema to the concept of “personality,” but on the other hand, some corporations have found a way to make it work. Scobleizer, for example.

It’s kind of fun these days, watching kids who barely shave create trends that start huge corporations running to catch up. As soon as there are enough best practices and policies and procedures for corporations to feel comfortable with blogs, the next innovation will hit. How will we manage the employees who choose to stream holograms from their cubicles?

While I was writing (that is, “blogging”) about Robert Ward’s Four Kinds of Rain yesterday, I was trying to make sure I didn’t say too much about what actually happens in the story, which is also a key consideration when writing a review. One of the frustrating things about being a book reviewer is that, if I don’t want to be the jerk who spoils it for everyone - I might sometimes want to be another kind of jerk, but definitely not that kind - I can’t get too specific about things. Using specific examples is essential to good expository writing, but book reviews must balance the sometimes competing imperatives of making an argument and piquing readers’ interest. And if readers know what’s going to happen, they’re less likely to pick up the book.

As a rule, I try not to discuss plot developments that happen after the first 100 pages. (That’s not set in stone - if a big twist happens on page 30, I might leave that out as well.) I read novels to the end, of course, because the quality of the ending has a lot to do with my recommendation, but I can only discuss endings in a general way, e.g.: “…John Doe’s book is a speeding locomotive that catches fire, runs over the reader, jumps the tracks, spills its freight, crashes through a barn, and still manages to get to the station on time.”

Or words to that effect.

But not being able to discuss a book’s plot too specifically does limit what I can say about the book. That’s why I call myself a reviewer, not a critic. To me, a reviewer provides equal parts plot summary, clues to setting and theme, larger context for the book, and a summary judgment - shake well with ice and serve with an olive (or a cocktail onion, if you prefer). In short, it’s a recommendation that helps you decide if the book is your sort of thing or not, and if it is your sort of thing, whether you’re likely to like it.

A critic writes well after publication, usually in small literary journals, teasing out themes and metaphors for people who aren’t worried about finding out what happens so much as they’re worried that they’re missing something. Critics also use the word “trope” a lot.

(Wait, I use the word “trope” a lot. Let’s say that critics use the word “problematize” a lot.)

One of the other frustrating things is that I’m always reading books before everyone else, and by the time I find myself in conversation about them, months later, I’ve forgotten many of the salient details. And, because my reading is assigned to me, I often don’t get to the big books that everyone else is talking about. Just ask me about The Plot against America, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Everything Is Illuminated, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius…even The Da Vinci Code. Or rather, don’t. I haven’t read them and, short of sabatical or a pink slip, have little hope of getting to them, because publishers, darn it, keep publishing new books.

When, on the extremely rare occasion that I am at a party and people are actually talking about books, and they’re talking about one of these books-of-the-moment, on the even rarer occasion that someone present recalls that I am in some way affiliated with the book-reviewing business and asks me what I think of said book (assuming that, not only must I have read the book, there would be no way I could keep my job if I hadn’t read it), my method of saving face is always the same: I blame my editors.

Yes, I am an editor, but I don’t assign books for review. Bill Ott, editor and publisher of Booklist, and Brad Hooper, adult books editor, select books for me to review. And, given that they obviously know in advance which books will dominate the New York Times bestseller list, how dare they assign me anything else? Don’t they know how ineffectual I feel at cocktail parties?

Seriously, the joys of book reviewing outweigh the sorrows. I’ve come to love many books that I never would have found on my own. But before I came to work here I plodded along happily, reading books in my interest areas, wishing I could get to more of them but not having nightmares about it. Working at Booklist is a bit like being an accountant in the king’s treasure room. Every day you’re surrounded by riches that aren’t yours to take home with you. Every day I see reviews by colleagues, entire lists of the books worth reading, and think, “One of these days….”

Meanwhile, new books land on my desk, and I’m glad I get to read those, too.

I finished reading Robert Ward’s Four Kinds of Rain, and it was in some ways what I was expecting - a dark comedy about a bumbling criminal who throws away a chance at real happiness for a treasure that ultimately turns out to be worthless - but in some ways it was a lot more than that.

Right after I wrote my last post I came across a surprising plot twist. And while the second half of the book does explore just how far Bob Wells will go to protect his ill-gotten gain, this isn’t one of those books where it’s all a matter of plot mechanics - crosses, double-crosses, car chases, and shootouts. While there are some of those, Ward enjoys performing psychoanalysis on Wells, teasing out the rationalizations that his character makes in order to justify his career change from do-gooder activist shrink to extremely active criminal.

Ultimately, Wells’s late-life ethical lapse has more to do with his inability to let go of his youthful idealism than simple greed. In fact, Ward is so savage toward Wells’s dippy hippie ethos that I have to wonder whether Ward is: a) exorcising his own past beliefs; b) making a statement about the unsustainability of idealistic belief systems in general; or c) just a cranky guy who never bought into that stuff in the first place.

Wells is fake and shallow, bitter that his humble, quiet efforts to help the less fortunate haven’t made him into a rich and famous person, which is funny. He’s a good target, and an inventive one. Of course, these days sincerity seems more often mocked than cynicism, so the fact that this last remaining holdout turns out to be such an ass made me wince once or twice. I still think it’s more fun to skewer the rich guys, but of course you can’t complain about a lack of political balance in fiction. It’s just one character in one situation, so I’ll shut up about that.

Anyway, Ward is funny and cynical, his book is dark and violent, and I liked it a lot. If I didn’t love it, I think it’s because he spends too much time in Wells’s head. The book could have been even funnier if we had the chance to sometimes discover Wells’s changing attitudes through action, not internal monologue. But it was still time well spent.

And it occurs to me that, in my last post, I was writing about the ways in which Four Kinds of Rain feels like one of those great ’50s pulps. Even though the protagonist is the bad guy, it’s kind of like one of those books where the tough, square cop is disgusted with the beatniks - or one of those ’60s pulps where the tough, square cop is disgusted with the hippies - only Ward is playing the cop in this one.

I started reading a new book last night, Robert Ward’s Four Kinds of Rain. I’ve never read Ward before, but his book Red Baker (1985) was apparently great. It won him a gig writing for Hill Street Blues, and he went on to become a successful writer for other television shows. If OCLC serves me right, his last book was Grace: A Fictional Memoir (1998).

I don’t know if this is a mini-trend or just coincidence, but Andrew Klavan, whose Damnation Street I just reviewed, also has some Hollywood connections: a couple of his novels were made into movies, and he wrote a couple of produced screenplays, too.

Anyway, Ward, like Klavan, has a love of old-school hard-boiled crime novels, but Four Kinds of Rain is a lot less dark than Damnation Street. Even though it references Ambien in the first sentence, and stars a washed-up ’60s activist, has a vibe that fits nicely with the lighter ’50s pulps. I think of Peter Rabe and Day Keene; modern-day analogs might include Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, or Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosely novels. (Hiaasen’s a stretch, but I can imagine him and Ward hitting it off over drinks.) Four Kinds of Rain wouldn’t have been a bad fit for Hard Case Crime, either, where they also publish old-school stuff with contemporary settings.

The basic outline: Bob Wells, divorced, lonely, drinks too much, is a jaded community activist with a failing psychology practice. About the only thing that keeps him alive is his once-a-week gig in an oldies band, The Rockaholics, but even that is threatened: if they can’t find a better singer, they’re going to be replaced with a younger band. Enter Jesse Reardon, a smoky-voiced West Virginian who steals the show - and Bob’s heart. He falls head over heels in love with her, but Jesse keeps her distance. She comes from hardscrabble beginnings and has heard about Bob’s financial problems (he gambled away his life savings during a midlife crisis).

She wasn’t going to be into making sacrifices for “the people.” Hell, she was the people. 

Bob assures Jesse that he’s got money in the bank, and love blooms. But Bob is convinced that, if he doesn’t actually get some money in the bank, Jesse will leave him. One of his patients, an art dealer named Emile Bardan, says he has a priceless Sumerian mask (ironically, the god of justice) that a rival art dealer is going to steal from him. Bob, a good guy his whole life, decides to steal the mask himself.

The humor is very dry, and it’s fun to watch Bob as he gets in over his head.

Jesus, there was a lot to consider when you became a criminal. 

But also a lot of the humor comes from the fact that Bob has a blind spot big enough to hide a tractor-trailer.

…the whole thing - betraying the trust of his patient, stealing a valuable work of art - well, all of that would be enough to many any honest man nervous. 

I don’t know for sure, of course, but I believe Four Kinds of Rain will fall into the bumbling-criminal genre - not slapstick, but the guy who gets in over his head, whose greed changes him, who screws up his one chance at happiness by being too blind to see that it’s not money that can make him happy, but love.

Again, just a guess. But the evil lure of lucre - the elusiveness of happiness, the empty treasure vault - is perhaps the classic hard-boiled/noir trope. So I rub my hands greedily in anticipation…could this be the stuff that dreams are made of?

I’d love to hear suggestions in both the “bungling criminal” genre (comedy) and the “malevolent treasure” genre (tragedy). A couple off the top of my head:

Bumbling Criminals
Pronto, Elmore Leonard (1993)
Dutch Uncle, by Peter Pavia (2005)

Malevolent Treasure
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett (1930)
A Simple Plan, Scott Smith (1993)

Also, I need help with a better phrase than “malevolent treasure.” I took it from Donna Seaman’s review of A Simple Plan, and it works great there, but I’m looking for something that suggests the kind of feeling the protagonist has when, after he’s screwed over family and friends and ruined his life, his ill-gotten pile of cash catches fire.