Mike Heppner, Pike’s Folly

Pike's Folly

Mike Heppner

Knopf, Mar 2006, $23.95

ISBN: 0375412891

Fortyish multi-billionaire Rhode Islander Nathaniel Pike enjoys wasting money on Quixote projects that serve no purpose, except some weird inner fulfillment. His current ploy involves buying wilderness land from the feds in order to simply pave over the natural landscape at the top of a mountain before constructing an inaccessible K-mart.

Meanwhile, protestors begin a media blitz to discredit Pike as a lunatic defying nature. While Pike ignores his adversaries, an Interior Department bureaucrat plans to keep Pike's cash, while assisting the eccentrics opponents via using the FBI to investigate his activities to uncover dirt. At the same time that wealthy Greg Reese asks Pike to help him with his family's philanthropic foundation that hides ancestral guilt involving sexual abuse and mass-murder of slaves buried on Pike's former property. A collision is coming between several forces that will rendezvous on Pike's newly paved parking lot

This wild satire rips the American way of life, as the corporations and government get away with waste, abuse and fraud that is more sophisticated perhaps than the appalling crimes to slaves (not just the enforced bondage). The storyline contains a slice of America as a horde of red and blue descend upon Pike's peak. Though there are too many subplots to fully engage, and definitely not for CEO's, Mike Heppner can expect his phone and email patriotically followed, because he exposes the government-industrial complex as bush league towards the tax-paying masses.