Final Venture
Published 2026-08-16 13:52:34
Book info
- Author
- Year 2000
- Genre Thriller
- Format Ebook
- Pages 368
A cure for Alzheimer’s would be worth billions. And well worth someone killing for.
Simon Ayot is an Englishman working for Revere Partners, one of Boston’s top venture-capital firms. The firm’s star investment, worth millions of dollars for each of its partners, is BioOne, which is working on a cure for the disease.
Frank, one of Simon’s bosses and his father-in-law, is found murdered at his summer house in the marshes, and Simon is in the frame.
To stay alive, and to save his marriage, Simon must figure out who killed Frank. And who will be the next to die.
Thoughts
I recently discovered a handful of Michael Ridpath books sitting in my to-read pile, so I've been working my way through them.
The book is about a firm of venture capitalists, but it's not inaccessible high-finance jargon. The firm are investing in research and development for curing Alzheimer's, and there's a lot of horror in the way the dementia patients are treated, the side effects of the drugs, and the way the investment suits talk about the patients... as if they are statistics. The book is 26 years old but all of that still felt entirely relevant.
There's a murder to investigate on top of that, but it felt like the smaller of the plot lines, despite driving a lot of the story. I couldn't get on board with how awful Simon's wife was to him. There's an explanation for it later, but I just couldn't get a lot of sympathy for her, or for him for putting up with it.
Ridpath's books remind me of John Grisham, where each book that is released has the same sort of formula. Grisham focuses on law, Ridpath is all about finance. There's a reliability there that keeps me picking up the next title. In this book, there's the added sensitivity of the dementia plot, but nothing felt badly handled.
There are a lot of unlikeable characters in this but it's a thriller that hasn't aged, so it gets a 4 out of 5.
Rating: 3 / 5