The Lockup Period

Thompson’s debut opens at 3:46 a.m. with a man in Ferragamos dragging a body bag down apartment stairs, banging it against the wall below, checking his Patek Philippe for scratches mid-effort. Silicon Valley’s self-regard meets the weight of consequence. The book spends 400 pages earning that setup.

Mario Kennedy, 25, sleeps in the attic above Prospector’s Pizza, showers at the Y, drives a Camry with screaming rotors. He let two founders work out of his storage space rent-free. They built MenuAi, a restaurant platform set to IPO at Unicorn status. Mario holds nearly 900,000 shares. He needs to survive 90 days without selling, also known as the lockup period, while venture capitalist Ravi Singh works to ensure he collects nothing.

Thompson knows this world. The Lanvin sneakers at the Stanford Shopping Center, the Sand Hill VC offices with founder-friendly signage, the IPO party in SoMa where bankers drink Dom and hurl a muffin at the TV. He’s been here before. That specificity is the book’s first pleasure. Mario is likable, which is hard to pull off. He has a bad temper, poor judgment, and a habit of improvising deeper into trouble. He flips a registration table at a Four Seasons investor conference in chapter three. He buys Audi rentals and Lanvin sneakers he can’t afford, convinced that looking wealthy is the price of admission. Thompson doesn’t judge him. He shows the math.

Jamie Villanueva, the Techsmack reporter, is better company. The scenes where her storyline meets Mario’s are the novel’s best. Thompson keeps them opaque to each other longer than expected. Ravi Singh is where the novel goes broad. His menace is real early — the condescension, the Einstein quotes, the institutional authority turned on a man with none. As the plot accelerates, he becomes an instrument rather than a character. The money laundering, the mob investors Bonetti and Hernandez, the DOJ sweep of 39 companies and 7 venture firms — it’s scaffolding, and it creaks.

The ending is earnest. Mario ends up at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, receiving a federal commendation in front of cameras, old friends, and the reporter he loves. Thompson means it. But the tidiness deflates what had been a story about belonging and what a city charges for admission.

What stays is the class architecture. In Palo Alto, a pizza man sleeping above his shop is a visible category error. The VC who quotes Einstein to dismiss him, the check-in man who calls him “the Pizza Delivery Boy” loud enough for the lobby to hear. Thompson records these moments without comment. That restraint is the book’s best quality.

The Lockup Period is a caper with a criticism: the Valley’s mythology of meritocracy has always had a velvet rope. For genre fiction with something to say, that’s enough.