It was a co-worker who introduced me to the works of Joseph Finder back in 2004. We were talking about books that we recently read and she mentioned Finder’s Paranoia, while I told her about Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. So both of us got intrigued with the little bits of plot that each one mentioned about these books so we decided to exchange books.
Paranoia is told in the first person by the protagonist. He is Adam Cassidy, a mid-twenties low-level corporate sales guy who got caught diverting company funds to throw a retirement party for one of the foremen in the loading dock of the high-tech company he works for. He did it because he felt sorry for the guy and generally bored with his job. The CEO and the head of security instead of prosecuting him would blackmail him into becoming a mole of the company’s biggest competitor. They would train and repackaged him into this smart, up-and-coming corporate whiz and engineer his employment to be one of the competitor’s top executive to be able to pass along proprietary and classified information on the competitor’s products and on-going projects. Overnight Adam turns into this hard-working genius of an executive and corporate spy at the same time and the pressure of leading this make-believe double life is was putting a lot of stress on the guy. What would make matters worst was he likes his new boss, who treats him like his son, and he fell in love with the woman executive who was handling the project, the information of which he needs to steal. How he was transformed from slacker to a driven executive, his double life, and what happens in the end makes Paranoia an excellent suspense thriller and a look at what extent corporations would go to, to destroy their competition.
Paranoia was such a page-turner that I believe that I finished it in three days. It piqued my curiosity of other works of its author.
I have read or listened, to via books on CD, Finder’s Killer Instinct, and Power Play; and just finished listening to Company Man. Killer Instinct is about this helpful friendly guy turned stalker and deranged killer that the protagonist happened to recommend for a position in security of the company he work for. Power Play is your corporate team-building retreat turned hostage situation. And Company Man is about Nick Conover, a CEO of a major corporation, who had to deal with issues like facing the fallout of firing five thousand employees, fending off the hostile takeover of his company, covering up an accidental killing and being one step ahead of its investigation, a rebellious son, and a crazed stalker all at the same time.
I still find Paranoia as the best of the lot but I generally enjoyed them all. What I noticed as common elements of Finder’s writing and style are his choice of the corporate environment as the setting for his works and how Finder’s protagonists would be this all-around likable guy thrusts in a bad situation, or being in a wrong place at the wrong time. Even if it was the protagonists’ fault that landed him in the tight situation he is in like in Paranoia or just plain bad luck, like in Power Play and Company Man, you can’t help rooting for the guy. I also noticed that Finder invests his protagonists with family issues, or father issues like with Adam in Paranoia and Nick Conover in Company Man to add depth to the characters and in turn, make his reader feel sympathy or empathize with the character’s predicament.
Check out the author’s official website to learn more about Joseph Finder and his other works. Most of his books and the its audio book versions are widely available to buy at major bookstores, used-books reseller, online store, or borrow at your local public library. I like listening to the audio book versions since the narrator, Scott Brick, is a really talented voice actor. The voice he gives to the characters helps me in conjuring how they would look and sound like. I think Scott Brick and Jim Dale are one of the better voice actors for audio books out there but that is another post for another day.
