PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
“Sharp, satirical observations on tech-dependent society and eccentrically comic characters keep the action moving.”
- Publisher's Weekly
THE MAN WHO WOULDN'T DIE
Silicon Valley scion Captain Don Donogue is dead under mysterious circumstances. Signs point to murder. Just ask Captain Don himself. He’s been sending messages about his suspicious death from beyond the grave. Yep, he’s been tweeting from the afterlife.
Could life after death be Silicon Valley’s latest innovation? This is the mystery that confronts the only sane person left in a region gone mad with greed, William Fitzgerald. Fitch. He’s a world-class detective—tough, stoic, carries a big stick and a flip phone. He’s a bad fit for Silicon Valley, where couples are so anxious to get into the best free-play kindergartens that they get on the waiting list as soon as they freeze their eggs.
One day, a woman knocks on Fitch’s door. She’s got a handful of cash and a wild story: She says that her father was Captain Don, or is Captain Don. He was killed, or maybe not. Fitch takes the case and goes into the belly of the Valley, discovering that life and death—well, sometimes they’re just another transaction.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Die marks the debut of a hilarious, original, and necessary voice in American comedic literature—one already being hailed as “the Carl Hiaasen of Silicon Valley.”
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Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (August 6, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0062201204
ISBN-13: 978-0062201201
REVIEWS
“The Man Who Wouldn’t Die does for Silicon Valley what Carl Hiaasen did for Florida, which is rollicking fun if you’d like your future to be a dystopia of terabytes. I’ll be first in line, or online, or retina scan,
to get A.B. Jewell’s next installment.”
– Tim Dorsey, New York Times Bestselling Author
“If Philip Marlowe was a standup comic he might sound something like Fitch, the wisecracking, tech-savvy PI in this funny and twisted rejiggering of the classic detective novel. Think Silicon Valley meets The Big Sleep.”
– Mark Haskell Smith, author of Blown
“Forever Man is Dashiell Hammett 2.0, Raymond Chandler with emojis, James M. Cain after a trip to the Apple Store: The classic hardboiled detective novel, updated for 21st Century Silicon Valley and made hilarious. Even if you’ve read every P.I. novel out there, you’ve never read one like this before.”
– Brad Parks, Shamus Award-winning author of Closer Than You Know
“Stuffed with so much invention. … A Hiaasen-esque farce.”
– Kirkus Reviews
WHO IS A.B. JEWELL
A.B. Jewell is my new pen name, a nom de guerre, still me but with a new paint job. Why a new name? This book, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, is a departure from what I usually write. It’s funny, or it’s supposed to be funny. It’s a comedic detective novel, a farce, a send-up of Silicon Valley, which Matt Richtel (me) takes very seriously with very serious articles in The New York Times and very serious books but A.B. Jewell (also me) not so much. A.B. Jewell thinks that when a Silicon Valley entrepreneur says he wants to invent new software to “change the world,” what he really means is that he wants to invent new software to change his Honda into a Tesla. My publisher, Harper Collins, suggested a new name for a new genre and Matt Richtel (me) said: why not A.B. Jewell? That has a nice ring to it! Bottom line, if you love the new book and find it funny, tell your friends about A.B. Jewell (me). If it doesn’t work out for you, then try the more serious stuff by Matt Richtel (who remains me).
Affectionately,
A.B. and Matt.
P.S. – This is an essay I wrote about choosing a pen name, which, as you’ll see is a name I share with a water treatment plant in Tulsa. I kid you not.