"One psycho can sure ruin your whole day," says David Johnson, one of the lead characters in Downtick, after he's received death threats, body parts, and an attempt to torch his house by someone. David is facing a form of evil that has set out to take away his career, his family, and ultimately, his life.
As Downtick opens, David 'DB' Johnson, a major player on Wall Street, is trying to make a deal with the Coca Cola company. But David's balance has been thrown off when an anonymous letter arrives telling David: "I'm the nightmare you seeded many years ago. Guess what? I'm back! And I'm coming to kill you."
The action alternates between David's perspective as he tries to outsmart his pursuer, and the perspective of Fenton Montague, the unstable man whom David and a friend unwittingly pushed over the edge twenty years earlier. While capable of functioning in the 'normal' world, Fenton is a psychopath. He thrives on inflicting pain on others, hearing the voice of God urging him on.
At the midpoint of Downtick, the action moves from the Connecticut suburbs to Harrison, Maine, where David's wife and two boys have sought refuge with David's best friend, Jonah Roberts. Jonah is a recovering alcoholic who left Wall Street seven years previously. What no one realizes is that Fenton Montague has followed them.
Downtick is full of surprises, with a plot that twists in believable but unexpected and often unsettling directions. Ashbaugh spares us the cliches which often plague modern thrillers. The cops in Downtick are neither corrupt, bumbling, nor obnoxious. Bankers and businessmen, so often the target of righteous indignation at the Box office and the Bestseller list, are not the personification of evil in Ashbaugh's Wall Street, but are real people with jobs, families, and principles.
Ashbaugh treats us to plenty of well-researched police procedure, with interviews, psychological profiling, fingerprinting, police databases, etc. We are allowed to trail along with detectives in pursuit of the killer, and follow them into the homes of victims as they bear tragic news. We are given an honest, glamor-free perspective of violence its consequences.
The early part of Downtick gives an interesting view of investment banking, deal-brokering, office shenanigans, and life on the trading-room floor. I was fascinated by all this data, and would have been pleased had Downtick been nothing more than a thriller of the stock-market. But in no time I was caught up in a dark world of psychological terror that places it in the same league as James Patterson and Thomas Harris.
