A Highly Recommendable, Enthralling Read

Three men—two brothers and the younger one’s boyfriend—discover a man fallen flat on his back in a snowy, deserted cemetery. With no assistance from them, he regains his feet and they begin to talk. It turns out that the mysterious man is wealthy, and asks them to perform a simple task—to mail a letter—for which he’ll pay them fifty dollars each. Naturally the men are wary of being pulled into some illegal scam, but they fulfil his request, agreeing to consider a further “job” for much more money should they decide to meet him back there in two days’ time. Despite this surreal, almost Kafkaesque opening premise, The Millionaire’s Cross is a realistic study of the effect that large amounts of money can wreak on quite “normal” people.

The main character, Alex, is a fairly conservative small-town guy with homely mundane dreams: trying endlessly for a child with his wife; rallying around his parents when his mom gets cancer, and attempting to set his younger brother on the straight and narrow. Not for him fantasies of financial empire, stardom, or exotic climes. Gay and five years younger than Alex, Trevor is the book’s most likeable character: deep-thinking, contemplative, moral, independent and fun-loving, even if slightly unambitious, compared to his brother anyway. His boyfriend Chad is depicted through Alex’s eyes as snobbishly distant in his alternative, in-jokey manner. Yet despite their poverty and what Trevor sees as its limitations, the gay relationship seems the happiest and most spontaneous in the book, certainly more so than Alex’s marriage.

With subtle adroitness, the plot develops in an outwardly conventional mode, yet little by little, Alex is pulled deeper into a web of deceit built of his own avarice, leading him to commit ever more desperate acts, until like Macbeth, he ends up shut into a lonely isolation of his own making. For me, the finale, though not wholly unexpected, came suddenly, but I could envisage no better outcome to the story. The book hooked me in right from the beginning and kept me reading till the end, even though I was at first dubious about the plot’s premise. This is a highly recommendable, enthralling read.

Get The Millionaire’s Cross by Sal Nudo here.