Gasp!: A Novel of Revenge

by Frank Freudberg

Martin Muntor -- a journalist dying of lung cancer -- is a dangerous man: he's smart and he's mad and he has nothing to lose. Muntor has it in for the tobacco industry. He doesn't give a damn who gets... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1569800715
• ISBN13: 9781569800713
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Barricade Books
• Length: 415 Pages
• Weight: 1.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Thriller!

Gasp! opens as Martin Muntor prepares to exact vengeance upon the tobacco industry. A lifelong smoker, Muntor is suffering from terminal cancer. After lacing hundreds of cigarettes with cyanide, Muntor sends the tampered packages to hundreds of  tobacco vendors through the country. Packaged as a tasty new cigarette from TobacCo, the vendors are eager to try out the new product. The body count rises as hundreds of people die a relatively quick, but ghastly, death.The FBI heads the investigation to find Muntor and put an end to what has quickly become a national panic about cigarette smoking. In addition, fictional tobacco giant TobacCo's chief of security Tommy Rhoads searches for Muntor. Quit-smoking programs and anti-smoking campaigns are on the rise, cigarette sales are declining, and TobacCo's stock is sinking fast. Rhoads is offered a huge bonus to solve this case quickly. But Rhoads doesn't know what he is in for, and he doesn't realize that he is in the middle of a deadly cover-up and double-cross at TobacCo. By the novel's end, we wind up questioning whether or not Martin Muntor is the real villain of this story.

Gasp! is the classic thriller -- hooked me on page 1 .

Gasp! is about a Philadelphia journalist who gets lung cancer from smoking. He decides to spend his remaining days expressing his gratitude to the tobacco industry -- by slipping cyanide-laced cigarettes into retail distribution. In the first week of tobacco terror, several hundred people die. You should see the panic -- especially in the tobacco firms' boardrooms when sales begin to slip! It doesn't take long for the journalist Martin Muntor to become one of the most sought-after men on the planet. The FBI and a tobacco industry goon squad are after Muntor -- who does outrageous things in part because he has nothing to lose. But when he tells a reporter (via pay-phone interview) that "the tobacco companies put things in cigarettes that kill people, so why can't I?", the public begins to see the dying man's point. What I want to know is when is the movie version of this book coming out? -- because I'll be first in line. I started this book one night at 10 when NYPD Blue was a re-run. At 5:30 the next morning, I finished it. One out of every 50 books I read so totally satisfying that I walk around euphoric for the next couple of days. Gasp! is one of those books. The dying journalist is an expert at manipulating the media, taunting the FBI and driving the tobacco industry mad. And Freudberg, the author, demonstrates an equal genius for hooking readers and keeping them hooked. (Reviewed by Thomas Cattalin, Books & Cinema Syndicate)

Gasp captures the rage of a dying David fighting a Goliath

What would you do if you learned that a multi-billion dollar corporation hid vital information from you (and the rest of the public) simply to enhance its bottom line? And what would you do if that information could have helped you save your life? Well, if you were Frank Freudberg's nightmare character Marntin Muntor, you'd set out on a murderous spree designed to give the tobacco industry a taste of its own medicine. In Gasp!, Muntor , a wire service editor dying of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking, learns how to poison cigarettes with sodium cyanide and heads west from Philadelphia, leaving a trial of death and chaos. The FBI and a tobacco industry goon squad head out after him. But Muntor is smart and cautious as a cat, and he's tough to get a bead on. Eventually, the old it-takes-one to-catch-one truism comes into play and another semi-mad man (a tobacco company investigator) puts himself in Muntor's shoes. The problem is, the investigator then kind of sees Muntor's point. This book kept me so rapt, I literally couldn't put it down. There were actually times when (during a scene where the FBI and tobacco industry hired-gun almost capture Muntor) my heart was actually pounding. Read it