By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Just when you thought it was safe to use your credit card, the Desire Card team is back to severely cut your throats-uh interest rates. Well before they cut your throat, your organs, and the organs of your closest friends and family members.
Set approximately 40 years after the first book Immoral Origins, the antagonists of Lee Matthew Goldberg's creepy and sinister crime thriller series have grown their operation exponentially. Once in a hideout near Hell's Kitchen New York, the main office is in a swank penthouse. Instead of wearing human-like masks of Old Hollywood stars, the do badders can now opt to get surgery to look like the stars of yesteryear. Some don't even don the Hollywood identities, so a Desire Card employee could be anyone: your lover, your mother, the hotel desk clerk, that nice old lady across the street, anybody.
Once with two offices in New York and London (with the London office only having two employees), Desire now has offices and operators all over the world and have their fingers in just about every corrupt activity going on. What hasn't changed are the Old Hollywood identities that many who work for the card live under, though now not everyone, and that the entire outfit is still overseen by the amoral enigmatic Clark Gable.
The protagonist in this one couldn't be more different from the predecessor's Jake Barnum AKA Erroll Flynn, if he tried. Instead we get J.D. Storm, Iraqi War vet and former sniper, now operating under the name and guise of James Dean. Instead of the wide eyed petty crook that Jake was, J.D. has been in the Desire Card game for some time. He has acquired a reputation for good marksmanship and ruthless efficiency. He and his partner, Humphrey Bogart are not to be trifled with.
Unfortunately, J.D. has a handicap that prevents him from being 100% good at his job. He is afflicted with a terminal case of conscience. He hesitates to go after a young woman and then when he and Bogart are to kill a man in front of his young son, J.D. refuses and goes into hiding. The Desire Card do not take resignation lightly. I mean he didn't even give two week's notice-rude! So, J.D. is on the run and never knowing when the Desire Card will catch up to him or who is affiliated with them.
Besides this, we also go into the background of J.D's life before he joined the card and how he got involved. He grew up in a small town in Washington state and had a girlfriend, Annie, who worked as a mark for a gang of thieves. She used her body to distract cashiers and clerks while her colleagues robbed them. J.D. suggested that she could go legit. In response to that suggestion, Annie left to join her gang and J.D. left to join the Army.
While on the battlefield, J.D. was trained as a sniper, only to be shot in the eye which could be detrimental for a sniper (no depth perception). So upon returning home, J.D. gets an eye patch and an overwhelming feeling of PTSD. He joins a support group which includes a woman named Rita, who looks a great deal like Rita Hayworth. Guess who she works for?
This beginning and the chapters where J.D. returns to his small town and reunites with Annie reveal the type of character that J.D. was and might still have been if the Desire Card hadn't gotten hold of him. He was once a good guy who couldn't stand to see innocents suffer. He was protective of abused women and children. During his time with the Card and even during his exile from them, his once idealistic protective nature is crushed. By the end he becomes the very monster that he once feared, one who will willingly kill the innocent without conscience, to get even with someone else.
What is revealed throughout this volume is how much The Desire Card has grown in size, prominence, and means. One way this is evident is in the recruitment process of new agents. In Immoral Origins, Jake and other newbies wore faceless masks and did petty crimes like delivering drugs and other suspicious packages before moving up to big crimes and Hollywood names. J.D. did not go through that. He was handed the James Dean mask right away and given murderous assignments instantly.
From a storytelling standpoint, it makes sense that Goldberg wanted to skip this part since he didn't want to repeat himself but it also reveals something more sinister about Desire's current practices. They don't test the recruits because they don't have to. They already know what they have done and are capable of doing. All they have to do is look up records, research names, find their weaknesses and strengths, and voila another star is added to their heavens or rather hells.
Once a frightening organization hiding in the shadows, the Desire Card is now upfront and somehow more dangerous. Who knows how many CEO's, politicians, tyrants, celebrities, and people both famous and infamous have made deals with the Card? How many world events can be laid at the feet of Gable and Co.? How many innocent lives have been killed and operators rubbed out when they, like Jake and J.D., have seen the light? There is no telling and with an organization as large and as powerful as Desire Card, little chance of bringing them down.
After all, since we the Readers and the characters know very little about how the Desire Card operates, it could go on forever. There is a strong possibility, even suggested in the text, that the identities behind the mask change. There are a couple of Old Hollywood identities that I know for sure cannot be the same characters in the previous book. Also who's to say that this Gable is the same person as before?
In the 70's, Gable was more than likely middle aged and had been around for some time to create and organize the card and learn what he knew about the people behind him. That he is still alive and active is possible, but not likely. Though if he is the same man as before, it does bring some interesting possibilities as we learn more about him (and definitely crosses out one of my previous theories about him).
We learn that this Gable has a family including an adorable granddaughter and Chip, a flamboyantly gay son, whom he gives out of the way jobs to get rid of him. Chip especially bears an intriguing speculation. He's about late 30's to early 40's which meant that he might have been born around the same time or right after Immoral Origins. So if Gable is the same man as before, Chip's mother may also be a familiar figure from Book 1 as well.
As the Desire Card becomes larger, their stranglehold on their agents and clients become that much greater. They are practically unstoppable. Who knows how much larger they can grow and how many are destroyed by Book 3? One thing is for certain, it will be as sinister, suspenseful, and as hard to put down as the rest.
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