Never Enough

As I was winding up amidst my busy transactions in the Philippines closing up my loans from the bank for the two condos I am buying I still have time to read paperbacks which is one of my notorious hobby.

When I went to Hongkong to visit my big sister, she gave me this true story paperback as a present and as a peace offering. Well, she knows my weakness and I humbly accepted the book although I haven't started to read it yet.

I brought the book back to the Philippines and started to read it while on the plane and from there I never dropped it down. It was a page turner and I just can't stop reading it until I finished it in one sitting.

The novel was written by the famous Joe McGinniss who authored the best-selling novel "True Crime" and he had creatively weaved this true story into an interesting and readable piece of literary writing. I was so hooked up and totally hypnotized with the story as an eager gossiper willing to know the root of the crime. It was very informative, educational, sequential, and was told in simple words yet intricately woven into a piece of literary art.

The story told me about greed, money, betrayal, pain, divorce, hate and love, family, friendship, stock market, finance, even excerpts of SARS outbreak in a sequential order, murder, crime investigations, courtroom drama, forbidden love, unfaithfulness, wills, inheritance, insurance, travels, geography, everything woven in a literary artistic fashion that could be understood by a commoner like me.

The gist of the story revolved on two families but it mainly focused the life of a very successful international banker Rob Kissel and his wife Nancy who got married when they were young after they met in an exclusive nudist camp at the Carribean.

Rob was a very ambitious person, a workaholic who was gifted in manipulating and acquiring distressed funds from all over the world. Hired by Goldman Sachs and had established his own mark in the financial market, Rob just couldn't stop going up the ladder. Until he got the opportunity to become bigger he gave up his job at Goldman Sachs and accepted the lucrative and challenging job at Merryl Lynch as a director in their Asian Branch in Hongkong.

Rob and his family flew to Hongkong and had lived there successfully. He and Nancy had made three beautiful children in Hongkong and had lived there as royalty. Their lives had a lot of ups and downs yet Nancy had caused a lot of problems and strains with their relationship. Nancy was never been the same again after the birth of their third child. She was thought to have postpartum psychosis after the birth.

Having no medical involvement after the presumed diagnosis Nancy kept throwing fits and complained about her life as an expat wife. In retaliation to her husband having no time with the family she started spending a lot of money while her husband worked more than 80 hours a week hauling lots of money to their savings account.

The story was been spiced with the unfaithfulness of Nancy when she went back to Vermont and had met this hunky young guy who had installed the stereo components at her new mansion who she had designed and interiored out of Rob's knowing. She had an illicit affair with the stereo guy while her husband had bugged the house and her computer viciously watching and knowing what she was doing behind his back. He even hired a surveillance detective to follow Nancy and document was she was been doing.

Their marriage was on the rocks and Nancy's psychosis was still untreated and had kept escalating at times throwing fits and tantrums any time she needed attention. She was never been the same again.

When Rob told her to return to Hongkong after she got caught and was told about her illicit affair she even got worst and slowly planned to kill his husband like the one in the movie "Unfaithful" which was her favorite movie. They had submitted themselves for counseling but that did not work either. They were on a verge of divorce and Rob was planning to tell her of the plan but Nancy had killed him before he did it.

She had obtained five different sleeping pills and found a chance to slipped it in one of Rob's drink. When Rob was been knocked out with the drink she had the opportunity to hit his head with a family heirloom she got from her grandmother and had blown Rob's head five times which had killed him on the spot.

She fabricated a story that Rob had forced her and raped her and that they had a big fight then Rob had broke her ribs and took off. She never knew where he went.

Secretly, she rolled up Rob's dead body in a carpet and had sent it down to their storage down the building where they lived. The servants had tipped her best friend in San Francisco and Bryna had called all the exclusive hotels in Hongkong to check if Rob had checked in there after the huge fight with Nancy (which Nancy had told her) but to no avail.

After confirming with the servants about the odorous thing inside the rolled carpet at the storage, Bryna called the Hongkong police to have checked it out which was confirmed eventually as Rob's body. The body was found after three days that Rob was been missing.

News had spread all over Hongkong about Rob's (the famous expat and financial banker at Merryl Lynch)that had put Nancy's face at the headline news. The trial was been publicized and dramatized on television and it also made headlines internationally.

Nancy was confined in the maximum prison in Hongkong and she was eventually sentenced to a life in prison for killing Rob brutally with a blunt object on the head five times.

In between the trial she was also communicating to her lover in the United States. All her affairs with the guy was been placed in detail on the book and I don't like to expound it here. I just wanted to write the whole gist of the story.

The book also contained the life of Andrew, Rob's older brother who also got successful in real estate but got tried for embezzling a lot of money from his company and made fraudulent acts like forging signatures and issuing non-funded checks. Andrew was mysteriously murdered a year later at his house underground after Rob's death. It was believed he was killed by the people he had wronged.

The Kissels three children ended up with Rob's sister's custody. They inherited Rob's 20 million trust estate and had lived a beautiful life with their aunt and her family in California.

The book was very interesting, riveting, and full of page turner events which made me finished it for only one sitting. I know life has a lot of temptations and it's up to us to weave our own destiny.

Rob was been lucky to belong to the upper echelon of the human race but some of his decisions were been wrong which had eventually lead to his tragic death. Had he sent Nancy to get treated with her obvious psychosis they would probably end up to be a beautiful and lovable family.

Well, tempted and obscured by the will to amass more wealth and money Rob had neglected his family as well as himself. Sometimes we tend to get engrossed of going up to the top without even minding that we already stepped others as well as neglected to take care of ourselves. But life needed to be balanced in order to get to the summit of our ambitions.

The book had taught me about the need to look back and recollect about our progress in life and never to get tempted with the drive to go up the easy way. I know we are all gifted at our own capacity but we have to use our talents in the right way then we can achieve eternal bliss.