Josiah Vencel. The Pension Plan. Mav Press, 2020.

Usually subtitles are helpful but do not provide much to a book’s effect. The Pension Plan could be different. It is subtitled A Murder Mystery. In other words, this is not a book about retirement planning! This novel distinguishes itself in a number of ways.

Nowadays we speak of legal thrillers, a genre that really did not exist until attorneys Scott Turow and John Grisham started telling intricate and intriguing stories about legal cases. Yes, before that there was Perry Mason, but those were basically whodunits whose main character happened to be a lawyer. Similarly, people usually did not talk about medical thrillers until Michael Crichton appeared on the publishing scene.

So is The Pension Plan a forensic accounting thriller? Well, sort of. The author’s day job has been working with pension plans. In the course of the book we learn a lot about the funding of and politics behind public pension plans. Some of the details may actually get readers to think about their own pension plans or retirement account if they have one.

One example. A worker for a pension investment firm explains to young journalist Owen Daniels, the main character, that people often do not think of the significance of gains and losses in investments. Let’s say, for example, you have $100 dollars invested in an account and it drops 10%. that means it is now worth $90. But what percentage do you need to regain the loss? Actually, you need a little over 11%. If you said 10%, that would only be nine dollars (10% of $90). You would need a higher percentage to get back to where you were. Examine numbers and statistics carefully.

So the murder intrigue revolves around some shady dealings with a pension plan for municipal workers in a small central California city. The murder which we witness takes place about two thirds of the way through the novel, but there are suspicions that there may be others. Owen begins to see a pattern where retired city employees seem to all be coincidentally dying right around the time they turn eighty. Clearly, a pension plan would save money if its pensioners did not live too long, but how could this happen? And why? Or is it just an unusual string of coincidences.

Owen is especially concerned because his grandmother, his one living relative, will be turning eighty in less than a year and she is a retired city employee. He was doing feature stories on city employees, some retired, some still active, when he began to notice the weird coincidences. With the help of Darcie, the obituary writer, he sees that this pattern goes back a number of years. When he enlists the help of an interested police officer, J.R., things get going.

He begins to get warnings. His editor, hardnosed but fair, tells him not to pursue the story. He says he cannot tell him why because it was even above the editor’s pay grade to know the reason the order came down. He gets an anonymous envelope with photos of his place and his grandmother’s to let him know that he is being followed. Danger, Danger. Danger.

The Pension Plan also has some interesting discussions. Owen is politically left-wing. His grandmother, though a former government worker, is not. At one point she tells him:

“Take money from person A and give it to person B. That’s where socialism fails. There must always be enough person A’s to provide for person B’s.” (6)

This reminds me of Margaret Thatcher saying that socialism works until it runs out of other people’s money. We certainly see this from the historical record.

California, we are reminded, has legalized assisted suicide. It seems that some of the eighty year old pensioners have died of exposure to the poison used to kill people who avail themselves of this law—except that there is no record that any of them asked for this. How could this be done?

There is another very revealing quotation. Owen recalls a lecture from one of his journalism professors:

“But a journalist uses words to advance an agenda. Long after the facts in your article are forgotten by readers, the assumptions and emotions you infuse into your writing will stick in their subconscious minds. Do this often enough, and you will grow a populace that thinks like you do.” (18)

This is very interesting. A journalism major in the seventies would remember something very different. Journalism used to emphasize objectivity. Just tell what happened, use the four W’s (who, what, where, when, and maybe why), and let the editorial page give opinions. If what Owen (who was born a little before 2000) recalls is typical of today’s journalism classes, no wonder people complain about fact-checking and fake news!

A key to the mystery in The Pension Plan becomes a key to understanding existence. Though a skeptic, Owen begins to recognize a truth: “Patterns have pattern-makers!” (55)

The Pension Plan is a very intelligent mystery. It does involve a clever plot in a devious cover-up. It also raises other questions, as we have already shown. Even after the mystery is solved, it may keep readers thinking. Patterns have pattern-makers. Think about it.