April 17, 2017
At the start of Thriller Award–winner Finder’s enjoyable standalone, Michael Tanner, the owner of Tanner Roast, a specialty coffee company in Boston, mistakenly picks up the laptop belonging to U.S. Senator Susan Robbins of Illinois after going through security at Los Angeles International airport. Predictably, the laptop contains highly classified files about a secret surveillance plan being considered by the NSA. A friend who’s an investigative reporter, Lanny Roth, persuades Tanner to reveal what’s on the laptop and to hang on to it until he, Lanny, can work out a deal with the NSA. Meanwhile, it falls to Will Abbott, Robbins’s chief of staff, to recover the computer before it becomes public knowledge that a U.S. senator not only had classified material on her laptop but that she was careless enough to lose it. Though readers hung up on realism will just have to accept some unlikely elements (such as a coffee roaster as NSA adversary), Finder (The Fixer) once again shows his knack for crafting an engaging thriller. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House.
July 31, 2017
Late for his flight home to Boston, Finder’s protagonist Michael Tanner grabs what he thinks is his laptop, realizing later that it belongs to U.S. Sen. Susan Robbins. The senator is silly enough to stick a Post-it with the computer’s password to its case, allowing Tanner to access top-secret files about a very nasty government program. A friend of Tanner’s convinces him to hang on to the laptop and reveal its contents, causing the senator’s chief of staff, Will Abbott, to engage fixers to hunt Tanner down. Soon, he is on the run, not only from Abbott and his goons but also from a wily Russian named Gregory and Earle Laffoon, an NSA agent. Narrator Kearney brings energy and a fast pacing to the production, taking the plot swiftly past a few credibility potholes to get to the heart of the book, the fever-paced chase. Kearney makes character identification easy. Tanner sounds like an honorable guy, trying to decide what the right thing to do is now that he knows the contents of the computer. Kearns follows Finder’s description of Gregory’s “barely detectable accent” precisely and slightly modifies Laffoon’s “deep-southern accent” to a mild drawl that sounds sternly authoritative. Kearney’s best portrayal, of Abbott, the novel’s most complex character, is all faux efficiency around the senator, filled with self-doubt and guilt when with his wife and baby boy, and dangerously angry when on Tanner’s trail. A Dutton hardcover.