(Chelsea Update would like to thank Barb Sullivan for the information in this story.)
Rarely, if ever, have you read a novel that took you inside an auto parts supplier. John L. Daly of Sylvan Township does just that in his newly released novel, Tool & Die.
The story takes place in a small automotive parts manufacturer, Fairlane Tool and Manufacturing Company that successfully competes against large publicly traded companies until a new executive joins the team and threatens the company’s collaborative corporate culture.
Daly’s tale contains plenty of business substance for readers interested in management and finance, but its charm lies in the human side of his story. He portrays a range of credible characters in a medium size manufacturing company and offers interesting vignettes of typical role or personality conflicts while cleverly building up to a decidedly atypical workplace murder.
Readers who have secretly imagined vigilante justice at the office will enjoy Daly’s choice of victim, and everyone who understands you can’t check human nature at the office door will appreciate the murderer’s motivation.
Tool & Die features many real-life situations from Daly’s career, condensed into a single fictional story. He played with the book’s manuscript for more than 20 years, periodically working on it and then putting it away.
In the meantime, he wrote a business book, Pricing for Profitability, published by Wiley & Sons, and honed his writing skills on dozens of smaller projects including seminars, professional articles and a string of eight one-act plays produced by The Players in Detroit. Last summer, he found time to work on Tool and Die again and finished it four weeks into his COVID-19 quarantine.
Tool & Die is available in both Kindle and paperback editions at www.Amazon.com.
