"The movement of a novel, even one as finely written as "The GoodLife," across five points of view is potentially disastrous . . . But Scribner, who teaches in Stanford University's creative writing program, handles this challenge, cutting the focus not only to the action-Stona bound and gagged, Theo listening to his father's police scanner-but smoothly away from it, too into his characters' troubled histories . . . . The drama, we realize is not simply about the kidnapping of an oil-company executive and whether he will be rescued, but how one marriage strangely destroys another, how a father's belief in his son endures naively for decades and how economic defeat pushes people through despair into savagery." (full review)

                                                                   -- New York Times Book Review

"The GoodLife is like the literary love child of Truman Capote and Robert Altman. Combining the grisly true-crime minutiae of Capote's "In Cold Blood" with Altman's screwball social satire, the novel manages to be both horrifying and hilarious."

                                                                   -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Scribner's provocative first novel [is] an astute and detailed comment on the American Dream's criminal edge .. an effective warning about the narcotic effect of materialism." (full review)

                                                                   -- Publishers Weekly

"In taut, absorbing prose, Keith Scribner tells a cautionary tale about the times we live in. His story is both topical and extraordinary, certain to start many a debate on materialism and morality. The Good Life is an exceptional debut heralding the arrival of a powerful new voice in American fiction." (full review)

                                                                   -- Barnes & Noble Booksellers
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". . . written with a deft hand and an eye for detail . . . Scribner takes this story down a path that examines the disintegration of moral values."

                                                                   -- San Diego Union-Tribune

"Scribner has created wonderfully complex characters in a briskly paced narrative. . Based on an actual crime, this first novel is no less gripping for the inevitability of its plot, as it illuminates human motives and behavior."

                                                                   -- Booklist

"The GoodLife is a riveting, psychologically sophisticated first novel, based on the actual kidnapping of an Exon executive in 1992, by an improbable pair of criminals . . .[it] is told from several different points of view, which heightens the tension of the story considerably as we move from Theo, to Colleen, to their victim, who struggles mightily in his captivity with doubts about the women he has loved, the life he has led and the choices he has made." (full review)

                                                                   -- Library Journal

"Not since John Cheever's "Bullet Park" has a novel so captured the violent vicissitudes of suburbia."

                                                                   -- The Baltimore Sun

"Keith Scribner's new novel, which is based on the true account of a New Jersey couple who resorted to kidnapping and, ultimately, murder in a quest for the good life...explores society's compulsion to succeed, and the nature of greed."

                                                                   --Smoke

"The writer imagines with intimate compassion the anxieties and bruised dreams that motivate each character, and he achieves a luminous clarity... The novel, acid and observant about an indigenous sort of materialism, carries Theo and Colleen further from any chance of success until it produces a stunning wreckage." (full review)

                                                                   -- Montanan

"A thriller that stakes its chills on moral suspense-and hits the jackpot."

                                                                   -- A- from Entertainment Weekly

"Scribner demonstrates that he has the chops to become a major literary talent... [The GoodLife] is an important work that reads as if it was a collaboration between John Cheever and Donald Westlake. Very highly recommended." (full review)

                                                                   -- Bookreporter.com - Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub