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Summary
Author Notes
Joseph Finder was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 6, 1958, and spent his early childhood in Afghanistan and the Philippines. He received a B.A. in Russian studies from Yale University and a M.A. at the Harvard Russian Research Center. He also served as a teaching fellow at Harvard from 1983-84.
His first book, Red Carpet: The Connection between the Kremlin and America's Most Powerful Businessmen, was published in 1983 and is a nonfiction account of Western capitalists making profits from trade with the communist world. His first novel, The Moscow Club, was published in 1991. His other novels include Extraordinary Powers, The Zero Hour, Paranoia, Power Play, and the Nick Heller series. Company Man won a the Barry and Gumshoe Awards for Best Thriller and Killer Instinct won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Novel. High Crimes was adapted into a 2002 Fox film starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman.
Finder's novel, The Fixer, made The New York Times best seller list in 2015.
In addition to fiction, he writes on espionage and international relations for the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Finder's newest mixture of business technology and pulp fiction focuses on Jake Landry, the sole Hammond Aerospace junior exec attending a company retreat at a swank hunting lodge. He is alternately shunned or insulted by the obnoxious upper-level corporate types until the lodge is invaded by a band of homicidal hunters, and Landry is forced to fall back on lessons he learned on the wrong side of the tracks. Boutsikaris's low-key, amused delivery of Landry's narration is a vocal tightrope walk that successfully suggests enough intelligence to make his aero-tech talk credible and enough edgy cynicism to suggest a checkered past. His timing also gets the most out of the fast-paced action sequences. But his most helpful contribution to the success of the audio is his ability to find unique voices for the executive cadre. Finder individualizes his villains well enough, but he skimps a bit with the Hammond hierarchy, making it hard for the reader to recall one spoiled and pampered blowhard from another. Boutsikaris uses a variety of timbres and tones to give each true distinction. Simultaneous release with the St. Martin's hardcover (Reviews, June 18). (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The best-selling author known for his business thrillers ( Paranoia, 2004; Company Man, 2005) here focuses on the aviation industry, as the management team of Hammond Aerospace gathers in a lodge off the coast of British Columbia. The hard-charging businessmen are in full preening mode, showing off their high-end gear and slamming the company's female CEO. Jake Landry, who has been asked to step in for his boss and does not have quite as privileged a background, has brought the wrong clothes and the wrong attitude. When the lodge is overrun by a group of hunters, Jake suspects there's more to the scenario than a robbery, especially since the thieves are toting military-issue weapons. Finder's not much on dialogue and characterization (it's hard to keep all the egotistical businessmen straight), and he throws in just enough tech talk to give his story a realistic veneer. What he does do is hook his readers big time with an irresistible premise: watching the swaggering businessmen cower as a smart-mouthed former juvenile delinquent picks off the bad guys, one by one. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JOSEPH FINDER is perhaps the lead player in the corporate thriller genre, a thriving subset of the traditional suspense novel in which executives are both villains and victims. The stakes tend to be smaller here: there's no threat to the free world, no killer virus decimating American cities, no madmen plotting serial mayhem. What there is in "Power Play" is an off-site business conference gone horribly wrong - and we're not talking about a run on bran muffins or a lack of participation in the "trust fall" exercise. The top brass of Hammond Aerospace - a West Coast-based airplane manufacturer - have been transported to a Canadian fishing lodge so far off The Wall Street Journal's delivery route that the only link to the outside world is by satellite phone. But on their very first night, as the executives sit down to a sumptuous feast, they're interrupted by a camouflage-wearing bumpkin who swipes a braised wild partridge from one guest's plate before moving on to finger another's porcini-potato gratin. The executives, so jocular only a moment earlier as they listened to a representative from Corporate Teambuilders outline their schedule, dismiss the man as a half-wit who has lost his way in the forest - until he's joined by a band of guntoting brutes with names like Verne and Buck. In an Enron-meets-"Deliverance" twist, the intruders beat up a vice president and spew bad grammar in all directions before demanding a $100 million ransom. Naturally, it falls to Jake Landry, Finder's wisecracking narrator, to save the corporate coffers, er, leaders. And here's the rub: Landry wasn't supposed to be at the retreat; he's just filling in for his boss, who was delayed returning from an overseas trip. There are only two women present - the new, much-resented chief executive and her assistant, who happens to be Landry's ex-girlfriend. The rest of the hostages are rich white men. And, really, who cares about rich white men? Finder somewhat minimizes this daunting empathy block by including Landry's back story: as a troubled youngster, he learned the value of justified violence, first to protect his mother from his thuggish father and later to avenge a friend in juvenile detention. When the presumed townies start executing the businessmen, Landry's expertise in firearms and head-butting comes in handy. "Power Play" is absorbing yet unaffecting. Although the story is slow to take off, once the seaplanes land in front of the lodge the pace gallops relentlessly. None of the characters have very much depth, partly because the dashing lead is sure to prevail. Several of Finder's previous thrillers have been optioned by Hollywood, and "Power Play," with its dialogue-driven narrative, seems best suited to the same big-screen treatment. I suppose the real rush to be gotten from thrillers comes from their inspired problem solving. Being inside the narrator's head as he coolly escapes one predicament after another might lull readers into concluding that none of their own workaday problems are insurmountable - not that lost account, not that totaled company car, not that annoying new boss. And if all else fails, a strategic head butt might just do the trick. In an Enron-meets-'Deliverance' twist, a group of business executives is tormented by gun-toting brutes. Julia Scheeres, the author of a memoir, "Jesus Land," is at work on a novel.
Library Journal Review
A mild-mannered junior exec with a not-so-mild past is the only guy who can save the day when armed men crash Hammond Aerospace's off-site (very off-site) meeting. With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One "We got trouble." I recognized Zoë's voice, but I didn't turn around from my computer. I was too absorbed in a news report on the website AviationNow.com. A competitor's new plane had crashed a couple of days ago, at the Paris Air Show. I wasn't there, but my boss was, and so were all the other honchos at my company, so I'd heard all about it. At least no one was killed. And at least it wasn't one of ours. I picked up my big black coffee mug--the hammond skycruiser: the future of flight--and took a sip. The coffee was cold and bitter. "You hear me, Landry? This is serious." I swiveled slowly around in my chair. Zoë Robichaux was my boss's admin. She had dyed copper hair and a ghostly pallor. She was in her mid-twenties and lived in El Segundo not too far from me, but she did a lot of club-hopping in L.A. at night. If the dress code at Hammond allowed, I suspected she'd have worn studded black leather every day, black fingernail polish, probably gotten everything pierced. Even parts of the body you don't want to think about getting pierced. Then again, maybe she already did. I didn't want to know. "Does this mean you didn't get me a bagel?" I said. "I was on my way down there when Mike called. From Mumbai." "What's he doing in India? He told me he'd be back in the office today for a couple of hours before he leaves for the offsite." "Yeah, well, Eurospatiale's losing orders all over the place since their plane crashed." "So Mike's lined up meetings at Air India instead of coming back here," I said. "Nice of him to tell me." Mike Zorn was an executive vice president and the program manager in charge of building our brand-new wide-bodied passenger jet, the H-880, which we called the SkyCruiser. Four VPs and hundreds of people reported to him--engineers and designers and stress analysts and marketing and finance people. But Mike was always selling the hell out of the 880, which meant he was out of the office far more than he was in. So he'd hired a chief assistant--me--to make sure everything ran smoothly. Crack the whip if necessary. His jack-of-all-trades and U.N. translator, since I have enough of an engineering background to talk to the engineers in their own geeky language, talk finance with the money people, talk to the shop floor guys in the assembly plant who distrust the lardasses who sit in the office and keep revising and revising the damned drawings. Zoë looked uneasy. "Sorry, he wanted me to tell you, but I kind of forgot. Anyway, the point is, he wants you to get over to Fab." "When?" "Like an hour ago." The fabrication plant was the enormous factory where we were building part of the SkyCruiser. "Why?" I said. "What's going on?" "I didn't quite get it, but the head QA guy found something wrong with the vertical tail? And he just like shut down the whole production line? Like, pulled the switch?" I groaned. "That's got to be Marty Kluza. Marty the one-man party." The lead Quality Assurance inspector at the assembly plant was a famous pain in the ass. But he'd been at Hammond for fifteen years, and he was awfully good at his job, and if he wouldn't let a part leave the factory, there was usually a good reason for it. "I don't know. Anyway, like everyone at headquarters is totally freaking, and Mike wants you to deal with it. Now." "Shit." "You still want that bagel?" Zoë said. Chapter Two I raced over in my Jeep. The fabrication plant was only a five-minute walk from the office building, but it was so immense--a quarter of a mile long--you could spend twenty minutes walking around to the right entrance. Whenever I walked across the factory floor--I came here maybe every couple of weeks--I was awestruck by the sheer scale. It was an enormous hangar big enough to contain ten football fields. The vaulted ceiling was a hundred feet high. There were miles of catwalks and crane rails. The whole place was like the set of some futuristic sci-fi movie where robots run the world. There were more machines than people. The robotic Automated Guided Vehicle forklift zoomed around silently, carrying huge pallets of equipment and parts in its jaws. The autoclave, basically a pressure cooker, was thirty feet in diameter and a hundred feet long, as big as some traffic tunnels. The automated tape layers were as tall as two men, with spidery legs like the extraterrestrial creature in Alien, extruding yards of shiny black tape. Visitors were always surprised by how quiet it was here. That's because we rarely used metal anymore--no more clanging and riveting. The SkyCruiser, you see, was 80 percent plastic. Well, not plastic, really. We used composites--layers of carbon-fiber tape soaked in epoxy glue, then baked at high temperature and pressure. Like Boeing and Airbus and Eurospatiale, we used as much composite as we could get away with because it's a lot lighter than metal, and the lighter a plane is, the less fuel it's going to use. Everyone likes to save money on fuel. Unfortunately, the whole process of making planes out of this stuff is sort of a black art. We basically experiment, see what works and what doesn't. This doesn't sound too reassuring, I know. If you're a nervous flyer, this is already probably more than you want to know. Also like Boeing and Airbus and the others, we don't really build our own planes anymore. We mostly assemble them, screw and glue them together from parts built all over the world. But here in Fab, we made exactly one part of the SkyCruiser: an incredibly important part called the vertical stabilizer--what you'd call the tail. It was five stories high. One of them was suspended from a gantry crane and surrounded by scaffolding. And underneath it I found Martin Kluza, moving a handheld device slowly along the black skin. He looked up with an expression of annoyance. "What's this, I get the kid? Where's Mike?" "Out of town, so you get me. Your lucky day." "Oh, great." He liked to give me a hard time. Kluza was heavyset, around fifty, with a pink face and a small white goatee on his double chin. He had safety glasses on, like me, but instead of a yellow safety helmet, he was wearing an L.A. Dodgers cap. No one dared tell him what to do, not even the director of the plant. "Hey, didn't you once tell me I was the smartest guy in the SkyCruiser Program?" "Correction: excluding myself," Marty said. "I stand corrected. So I hear we've got a problem." "I believe the word is 'catastrophe.' Check this out." He led me over to a video display terminal on a rolling cart, tapped quickly at the keys. A green blob danced across the screen, then a jagged red line slashed through it. "See that red line?" he said. "That's the bond line between the skin and the spars, okay? About a quarter of an inch in." "Cool," I said. "This is better than Xbox 360. Looks like you got a disbond, huh?" "That's not a disbond," he said. "It's a kissing bond." "Kissing bond," I said. "Gotta love that phrase." That referred to when two pieces of composite were right next to each other, no space between, but weren't stuck together. In my line of work, we say they're in "intimate contact" but haven't "bonded." Is that a metaphor or what? "The C-scan didn't pick up any disbonds or delaminations, but for some crazy reason I decided to put one of them through a shake-table vibe test to check out the flutter and the flex/rigid dynamics, and that's when I discovered a discrepancy in the frequency signature." "If you're trying to snow me with all this technical gobbledygook, it's not going to work." He looked at me sternly for a few seconds, then realized I was giving him shit right back. "Fortunately, this new laser-shot peening diagnostic found the glitch. We're going to have to scrap every single one." "You can't do that, Marty." "You want these vertical stabilizers flying apart at thirty-five thousand feet with three hundred people aboard? I don't think so." "There's no fix?" "If I could figure out where the defect is, yeah. But I can't." "Maybe they were overbaked? Or underbaked?" "Landry." "Contaminants?" "Landry, you could eat off the floor here." "Remember when some numbskull used that Loctite silicone spray inside the clean room and ruined a whole day's production?" "That guy hasn't worked here in two years, Landry." "Maybe you got a bad lot of Hexocyte." That was the epoxy adhesive film they used to bond the composite skin to the understructure. "The supplier's got a perfect record on that." "So maybe someone left the backing paper on." "On every single piece of adhesive? No one's that brain-dead. Not even in this place." "Will you scan this bar code? I want to check the inventory log." I handed him a tag I'd taken from a roll of Hexocyte adhesive film. He brought it over to another console, scanned it. The screen filled up with a series of dates and temperatures. I walked over to the screen and studied it for a minute or so. "Marty," I said. "I'll be back in a few. I'm going to take a walk down to Shipping and Receiving." "You're wasting your time," he said. Copyright (c) 2007 by Joseph Finder. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Power Play by Joseph Finder All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
