Terminal Ambition:
A Maggie Mahoney Novel
by Kate McGuinness
Description
In this gripping tale, an avalanche upends the meteoric career of Maggie Mahoney, a high-flying female partner in a prestigious Wall Street law firm. Brilliant and beautiful, she became the trophy wife of its managing attorney. After a torrent of snow kills both her husband and her principal client, Maggie is reduced to being just another insignificant female partner at the venerable Sweeny, Owens & Boyle.
Obsessed with his dream of becoming the next Attorney General, firm chairman Andy Anderson creates a tangled web of deceit in a desperate gamble to conceal the firm's secrets and the shocking skeleton buried deep in his own closet. Maggie suspects he has a hidden agenda when he appoints Jack Slattery, a former prosecutor unqualified to be managing attorney, to replace her husband. She is certain Jack has potentially lethal information about Andy, but what is it?
Forced to become a sleuth, Maggie stages a break-in to gather evidence. But she's not the only one inside the firm playing detective. Andy will stop at nothing to achieve his ambition and deploys his loyal lieutenant to recruit unknowing partners in breaking all the rules. Rape ups the stakes as the cat and mouse game between Maggie and Andy plays out to its shocking finish.
Book Trailer
Review
By Laren Bright
Some books give you a sense of a world that may be foreign to you. Books like Terminal Ambition drag you into such a world and give you the full-immersion experience.
From the first page I was into it and simply didn't want to put it down. And the best part: it wasn't just an entertaining read, it gave me real insights into an issue that, being a man, I would not be able to experience firsthand. This was darn near as good - or maybe I should say as bad - as being there.
A really impressive debut and one can only hope the first of many more books to come.
About the Author
Kate McGuinness practiced law in courtrooms, conference rooms and boardrooms. She started her career as an intern with the San Diego City Attorney's office where she prosecuted misdemeanors. Following graduation from law school, she joined a major international law firm. After seven years in the trenches, she was invited to join the partnership, becoming one of only a handful of female partners among the firm's equity owners who numbered more than a hundred.
Her practice ranged from leveraged buyouts to bankruptcies to investigations of corporate malfeasance. Her work took her from Los Angeles to London with frequent stops in New York City, Dallas and Denver.
After seventeen years at the firm, a Fortune 300 company recruited Kate to serve as its General Counsel. The position came with an office on the executive floor where she was the only female officer. Mercifully, the other women there filled her in on the corporate playbook. Kate left the company following a restructuring.
After the corporate world, Kate studied creative writing at UCLA and USC. She is the author of the legal thriller Terminal Ambition: A Maggie Mahoney Novel. Kate also blogs regularly about women's rights. Her essays have appeared in Forbes Woman, The Huffington Post, Women's Media Center, Jezebel, The Frisky, Ms. JD, Role/Reboot and Fem2pt0.
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