Killer Weekend allows Ridley Pearson to settle a lot of scores but they’re not all in his fictional world. Most readers will get sucked into this engaging new political/power-elite thriller without ever realizing that Pearson is taking a stab as his adopted hometown of Sun Valley, Idaho. Killer Weekend depicts the town as an intricate web of adultery and other assorted domestic troubles overseen by a small-town sheriff fending off an unruly bunch of hired guns. But because the writer doesn’t bother to disguise his characters from the real-world oddballs they’re based upon, the reader is left wonder where the thriller ends and the culture of the mega-wealthy begins.

This quintessential beach book follows a fairly simple formula: Elizabeth Shaler is an Attorney General who has stepped on a few too many corporate toes. She is expected to announce a presidential bid at a large technology conference being held by a billionaire entrepreneur. It becomes incredibly clear early on that the entrepreneur, Patrick Cutter, is mainly concerned with throwing a good conference not protecting Shaler from an unknown entity that has taken out a contract on her life.

So it falls on the local sheriff to protect Shaler alongside the Feds who go out of their way to underestimate him. As we learn early-on, this is Walt’s second turn at saving Elizabeth’s life which appears to have earned him her trust. Meanwhile, Billionaire Cutter is distracted when his deadbeat brother begins to rekindle an affair with the wife of one of the area’s most powerful individuals.

This is where the book gets really interesting. For the few people lucky enough to live in Sun Valley, it is fun to read his oblong digs at one of the valley’s most popular restaurants – Christina’s, a popular hang-out of ladies who lunch – and to see the area’s vet, Mark Acker, as a central character in the book. Heck, even his main character, Walt Fleming, is modeled on the local sheriff, J Walt Femling. It’s Pearson’s ‘ripped from the headlines’ approach for his other characters that will engage most readers, though.

Attorney General Elizabeth Shaler is a clear combination of local resident John Kerry and Elliot Spitzer. The C3 conference that is a centerpiece of the novel looks awfully similar to the Allen Conference that occurs every year. Figuring out which of the rich-list he used for some of the other characters is half of the fun of the book – in addition to a well-written and entertaining book, Killer Weekend has the added benefit of being a Sudoku-like gossip column.

We can only hope that this is the start of a new cycle for Pearson. In Fleming, he seems to have found an intricately human, brilliant character because, unlike so many other characters in the genre, he appears fallible. Perhaps that is why this is Pearson’s best book in years.

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