Alligator Blood: a poor man's Scarface

This is the sort of person we are required to accompany for 307 pages and presumably meant to sympathise with.

Daniel's chief piece of wizardry was this: develop a payment processing system that provided better-than-average validity checks on the payments being processed. His major strengths seem to be zero ethical qualms about nature of the business he enters into, and an insatiable lust for material wealth.

The world he sells his wares into is an ugly, masculine one. Men slapping each other on the back, men drinking expensive whisky served by scantily-clad serving waitresses, men vomiting in limousines and going to strip clubs. A world where women are seen chiefly as objects to be possessed.

The men are often described in unseemly detail: "…dressed in navy blue slacks and a tight-fitting white shirt, which showed off his chiselled physique, Ryan looked slick," or "…he looked like an Action Man doll owing to his toned physique and close-cropped brown hair with small quiff at the front."

The author seems to be in agreement with Tzvetkoff's love of the movie Scarface – the cult film about Cuban-American Gangster, Tony Montana.

Apparently Tzvetkoff's favourite quote from the movie is: "In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women." The author calls these "wise words."

Both Leighton and Tzvetkoff are more correct than they realise in embracing this mantra.

In Scarface, the Tony Montana ultimately over-reaches in his lust for money and power, destroys his relationship with his family, starts snorting the cocaine he is meant to be selling, and dies in a shootout with a rival drug cartel. In the final scene Montana falls from a balcony into a fountain with the words 'the world is yours' printed across it.

Daniel Tzvetkoff is the poor man's Scarface. He has the greed, but not the toughness, brutality, and cunning of the protagonist of the film.

Daniel loses every friend he has, treats his long-suffering father with disdain, dips into company money to fund his extravagant lifestyle, and ends up informing for the FBI after being charged with money laundering, bank fraud, and gambling conspiracy (Montana would never have turned snitch).

The sections of present-tense 'in the scene' enactments the book are the weakest – the tortured prose staunches any potential for the story to flow. The author sprays adjectives and exclamation marks around like a vacuous 25-year old multi-millionaire spraying Kristal over drunken patrons at a Vegas nightclub.

The book takes potentially fascinating incidents during the saga and manages to render them dull. For example, Tzvetkoff flies into Georgia, as the Russians invade in 2008, to try to convince the dodgy bank they are using to give back 10 million dollars of their money. Sounds like a hair-raising set-up, right?