Another outrageous all action thriller from Duane Swierczynski. Half a dozen "key personnel" of a firm that they're told is cover for a CIA operation are called in for a special meeting in the company's conference room on the 36th floor of a large office block in Philadelphia. Their boss shocks them by saying that they must drink the champagne provided and they'll all "fall asleep" - forever. If they refuse, he'll shoot them in the head. And that's when the fun starts.There's a lot of violence -...

Make sure to read this thing in one sitting. It wouldn't be quite as effective otherwise. Recommended for anyone looking for a BATTLE ROYALE-like rush.

My actual rating is 2.75 Stars. Since I don't enjoy rating a book less than 3 stars, I rounded up lol. It's not that I disliked the book, but I just wanted more from it. I love a good action book every now and then, even the violence if there's a rhyme and reason for it (ex. justifiable revenge, self-defense, good vs evil, etc.)….but this was just too much and too little at the same time, and maybe that's all it was meant to be *shoulder shrug*

Not much of a story here and what little there is was exremely cliché...

This is a review I wrote some time ago about Severance Package. I was...displeased by this ^ book. Today I came across a book that looks "very interesting. The synopsis almost convinced me to buy it. Then I checked out who wrote it...yep another book by Mr. Swierczynski. I am checking with other readers on that one before I spend money on it and even if it gets rave reviews, after this one I'll go very slowly before spending money on it. Severance Package ************ SPOILER ALERT *************...

Getting called in to work on a saturday? That is the worst. Getting called in to work on a Saturday and being told that you're a front for a secret government counter-terrorism unit? That's.. interesting. Getting called in to work on a Saturday and being told that your office is being shut down and you're all going to be killed? Well, is it too late to take a sick day?Swierczynski gives us the third installment in a sort of Philly-based unofficial crime trilogy. I say unofficial because it doesn...

There's been a terrible mix-up. Author Duane Swierczynski seems to have submitted this screenplay to a publishing house, and it somehow got printed and marketed as a book. Rife with cliche, Severance Package is about a wimp whose boss decides to kill his company. Cheesy, comic-book violence prevails, which I guess is supposed to be both fun and shocking.Maybe it's because I just finished a *real* violent book reading with literary value (Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), but Severance Package

For the past 30 years I've worked in the soul-sucking corporate world of cubicles and department meetings. Office cliques aren't really any different from high school cliques; you're either a cool kid or you're not. I've been in both camps through absolutely no effort on my part. I just want to put in my time and go home and not tell anyone about what I do for a living. So a novel about a handful of office workers at each other's throats one Saturday afternoon would be right in my wheelhouse. A

There's a cliche that pops up in cartoons and old slapstick comedies. A character with a ball and chain 'round his/her ankle stuffs said ball into a cannon, lights the cannon's fuse and shoots himself/herself over a wall. Well, you can't do that in real life---they already proved it impossible (and extremely dangerous, obviously) on "Mythbusters". But you can do it reading a book. That book is SEVERANCE PACKAGE by Duane Swierczynski. Do you want to taste the power of great storytelling? Cleanse

I love gallows humor. And Duane Swierczynski delivers. It's film noir meets TV's The Office, with a healthy dose of superfluous bedlam. The plot requires one to suspend disbelief, but it's over-the-top funny. Talk about taking fluid rounds (after-work drinking) a step to far, Duane does it with great style. I wonder if he'll be at B'Con 2008 and can I buy him a beer?Now I'm the girl who likes Jason Statham, Sam Jackson, and Frank Miller movies. Duane's novels have the feel of graphic comic-book

Severance Package - Duane SwierczynskiDuane Swierczynski… people in the book world will remember him for books like “The Blond”. Comic book readers will remember him as the new force behind the Marvel series Cable and Iron fist.. he also has a couple one offs i have never heard of.Severance Package was published last year. I had seen it on a number of bookstore shelves but never bothered to pick it up. It looked like manga and i just dont dig on the manga. US comics yes, Japanese comics, rarely....

Fast paced, graphic and ultra violent. I saw another reviewer say it was Tarantino-esque, and I can definitely agree with that. My only quibble is with the very end, and by that I mean literally like the last couple of pages. It was easy to see the twist coming and I spent the last few pages hoping I wasn’t right; I was. But still, all in all it was very entertaining. I’ll probably try another Swierczynski in the future.

I flew through this book and enjoyed every minute of it. It's an action-packed story about a finance company that's actually a front organization for a black ops anti-terrorist squad. Apparently, the orders have come down for the entire squad to be liquidated, and the book begins with the boss telling his entire managerial staff that the reason he called them in for a Saturday morning meeting is because he has to kill them all (and himself as well). He's booby-trapped all of the exits from their...

Perhaps the best way I can describe this book is to say it's as if Swierczynski reverse-engineered a movie that was Die Hard meets The Bourne Identity meets The Expendables. Wasn't that a novel? No? Well then write a novel based on the movie. It is non-stop mayhem with characters taking Rocky like punishment and then continuing to perform superhuman feats. So it has the flavor of a comic book and of grossly unrealistic but nonetheless entertaining action movies. Strong elements of parody, as wel...

David Murphy has called a mandatory Saturday meeting for his key employees. Everyone's pretty pissed about this (who wants to work on a SATURDAY?!) but that's before they get there. When they arrive, they learn that the elevator's been disabled, there's a bomb on the stairway exits and they have two choices: drink poison for a fast, painless death or get shot in the head (which may be fast and painless or may not. Hard to tell).A blurb on the back says that this book "begs for the next Tarantino...

Nothing good ever comes to people forced into work on a Saturday. This is especially true when you find out your office has been a front for a secret counterterrorism agency that’s been shut down and, well, everyone knows just a little too much. The solution? Drink the spiked champagne and go to sleep peacefully (and permanently) -- or get your brains blown out. Lucky for the reader, some choose to fight back and it's the bloody mess you hoped it would be. This book reads like a graphic novel or...

By now you've read all the adjectives describing Swiercynski's latest creative spin on mayhem: graphically brutal, uber-violent, twisted, and over-the-top. And yeah, it reads like a comic book - or at least like Frank Miller's remarkably distorted gore fest in film: "Sin City". But I couldn't help feeling that in Swierczynski's beautifully warped mind "Severance Package" is his idea of a love story - a totally off-the-rails dissection of love gone bad in ways that we mere mortals could never con...

Severance Package is a wickedly adrenalized, pulsating, page-turning piece of pulp. Like seriously, wtf? Everything is exquisitely exaggerated and unleashed in comic technicolor. I would love to have seen this as a graphic novel actually (or a slick Tarantino cinematic production), since so many of its best characteristics are both visceral and visual. This novel IS NOT grounded in realism, flirting much more with parody and noir. And what can I say? I loved it! It's bloody and ridiculous. Unbel...

Interesting premise that descends into an unending orgy of violence.

This book is nuts.The premise is nifty. Your boss calls you in for a weekend meeting, then proceeds to tell you and your co-workers that the office was a front, it's been shut down, and now he has to kill you.From there, it gets weird. Like, "psychotic Russian gymnasts doing a routine down twenty flights of stairs to outrun a cloud of sarin gas" kind of weird. That's not a metaphor, it's an actual example from the book.The action is non-stop, brutal, and often ridiculous. One person performs an