Harrison's book looks at gory side of N.Y.
Harrison, whose past offerings such as "Manhattan
Nocturne" and "The Havana Room" have offered well-plotted,
intense mysteries, serves up a less satisfying and much gorier
story this time.
Beginning with an extremely brutal multiple murder, "The
Finder" is packed with action, but it lacks the believability of
Harrison's earlier novels.
The murders send Jin Li, a beautiful, young Chinese woman who is
saved by a well-timed bathroom break, on the run. Fortunately for
her, Ray Grant, the hero of the novel and her former boyfriend,
seems to have nothing to do but care for his father - a former
police officer who is dying - leaving him plenty of time to help
out Li.
Li really needs the help.
Although she works as a supervisor for a company that cleans
office buildings, Li's real job is stealing information from them
and supplying it to her brother's company. He in turn is using it
to clean up on the stock market.
"As she prowled the target offices at night, Jin Li moved with
light-footed efficiency, for if you clean offices everyday, you
know a lot about them. Normally, she received plans of the floors
that CorpServe cleaned and made a point always to ask if there were
any sensitive elements of the job, such as a CEO who stayed late,
which offices needed to be vacuumed daily because of allergies,
which vacuumed less frequently, etc. All in the guise of providing
excellent service. ..."
But it also provided her with a blue print of where the good
stuff was.
The scheme runs afoul of Good Pharma, a drug company that seems
on the verge of introducing some exciting new products, and has
discovered what Li is really up to. For Grant, a former firefighter
who was seriously injured in the collapse of the World Trade Center
on 9/11, the race is on to find Li and save her before the bad guys
can get to her.
As always, Harrison's characters - those of low and high society
in New York City - are detailed. In "The Finder," they are also
broad in scope.
The people here range from millionaire investors to a hit man
with an especially gory means of disposing of the corpses he
creates. The executive of Good Pharma is equally strung out from
the stress of trying to make the company successful and the
chemicals he's ingesting.
This is far from Harrison's best work, and many of the plot
twists and turns are contrived and sometimes downright silly. The
book moves rapidly, though, and for those who are willing to worry
less about believability, it offers a face-paced venture into the
seamy side of the big city.