A fast-paced blackly-comic thriller about a group of four friends who attempt to commit insurance fraud worth millions. This dark caper is for fans of In Bruges, Get Shorty and A Serious Man.

CHAIN OF CAUSE
by Kurt Ellis
Penguin Random House South Africa, April 2024
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Fast paced blackly-comic thriller about a group of four friends who attempt to commit insurance fraud worth millions. Unfortunately, the friends make one mistake and poor decision after another putting them on a collision course with a relentless Ukrainian fraud investigator, a psychopathic American hitman, a ruthless local drug lord, and an Eastern European mobster.
Gabriel, passed over for promotion, decides to set up his own business. The business is a spectacular failure and he loses everything. Desperate and furious, he enlists his best friend Skellie, a conman, drug addict and drug dealer, to help him strike back at the institution that he feels has wronged him. Forced to enlist help on the inside, the mistakes come thick and fast and as the bodies pile up, Gabriel and Skellie do their best to make it out of their scheme alive.
A novel about injustices—historical, racial, gender, economic, and social—and an indictment of the practices in the financial industry in which Ellis has almost two decades of experience.

WGSA Muse Award winner Kurt Ellis is a screenwriter and novelist. Ellis is the author of the Johannesburg-set thrillers By Any Means (NB Publishing) and In the Midst of Wolves (Penguin Books). Winner of the Harry Oppen-heimer Creative Writing Award, Ellis has an MFA from the University of the Witwatersrand. Nominated for four 2021 WGSA Muse Awards, Ellis – a master at building tension through pacy plotting and nuanced characterization – won with his original pilot script Rainbow’s End.