Smart, well-written thriller. ( )

In THE FINDER Jin Li is a young, beautiful and very secretive Chinese
woman. Supposedly a supervisor for a company that cleans office
buildings in New York, she is actually an information thief who works
for her wealthy brother Chen's Shanghai-based company. Chen uses the
data she steals to make millions in the stock market. Good Pharma, a
company with some promising new products in the pipeline, discover
what Jin Li is up to and arrange for her to die. Jin Li escapes the
horrible killing as she is conveniently taking a toilet break nearby,
but two of her employees die of asphyxiation when their car is hemmed
in and filled with sewage. Realising that she was the intended victim,
Jin Li goes into hiding. Chen is worried over her disappearance, and
hires her ex-boyfriend Tom Reilly to find her after Tom convinces him
that he has nothing to do with her disappearance.

From here layer upon layer of plots are laid down. Twists and turns
abound with enough back stories to explain how the main players got to
where they are today. If you allow yourself the chance to stop and
think about the things you are reading, you will realise that reality
is stretched disbelievingly wide for a non-fantasy novel. But if you
can suspend belief, and not question what you are reading, it is a
fast paced adventure full of deliciously evil and wacky villains, who
make insider traders look like kindergarten kiddies. The ending is
odd – not what I would have expected at all after the remorseless
build up. I enjoyed reading THE FINDER, but there was something that
I couldn't quite put my finger on that stopped me from loving it. ( )

Like well-crafted pieces of an intricate puzzle, Colin Harrison in The Finder first lays out a large cast of characters and then skillfully brings them all together for a tight fitting resolution. The story opens with a disturbing, but original, murder scene involving a large load of raw sewage and a small car. But it turns out the intended victim, Jin Li, who runs an office cleaning and document shredding business as a cover to send corporate secrets to her stock market finagling brother Chen in Shanghai, stepped away from the scene at the critical moment and is now running for her life. It turns out that some of this un-shredded information has negatively affected the stock of Good Pharma, causing venture capitalist Bill Martz to lose a large chunk of his billions, and he’s not too happy about it. Enter the mob in various unseemly underworld characters, an ex-cop on his deathbed, and his 9/11 firefighting son, Ray Grant and you’ve got the makings of a page-turning thriller. While Harrison occasionally gives us a bit more detail than seems necessary, his ability to describe the surroundings and create both heroic and nefarious characters propels the story to its satisfyingly brutal ending. ( )