Jim Sandusky hears a noise in the middle of the night and discovers two men trying to steal his car. An ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary situation, Jim decides on impulse that he’s not going to play the victim and allow the thugs of the world to prevail. He takes revenge, but then so, too, do the hoods and the battle lines are drawn. How does a law-abiding citizen, a wine steward by trade, outsmart a couple of vicious professional criminals? Or does he?
This is a story about winners and losers and the price people pay for the decisions they make. Desinger takes us inside the protagonist’s head as he struggles to stay one step ahead of the thugs and to reconcile his own increasingly nefarious actions with his image of himself as a decent guy. In the tangled web he weaves, Jim finds himself lying to his wife, the investigating police officer and even himself as he struggles to regain his footing and find his way back to normalcy.
The Descent of Man forces the reader to confront the inevitable and uncomfortable question: What if this happened to me? And then to ponder the consequences, at least in terms of Jim, as he starts sliding down a slippery slope into unfamiliar terrain.
Books in Brief 