Colin Harrison’s ‘The Finder’
Colin Harrison’s ‘The Finder’ is a thriller that will take you to the edge of your seat and back again. The book is full on intricate details of a place that you know – but have never truly ‘seen’ before. The plot is thick and it seems that Harrison uses a bit of his ‘poetry’ to enhance the twists and make them more real and alive for the readers.
The result is a grisly page turner of a novel that lacquers its cheap thrills with an upscale literary veneer, even as it leaves the reader with some memorably visceral snapshots of a nervous, profligate New York City, barreling headlong into the new millennium. Ray Grant, the hero of “The Finder,” like so many of the author’s characters, is a man haunted by his past: a former fireman, he was gravely injured in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and in an effort to put that trauma behind him has spent years traveling to other disaster zones as a relief worker. He has since returned home to New York to tend to his ailing father, a former cop who is terminally ill.
Ray doesn’t like to talk a lot about his past, and he thought he’d found a happy match in Jin Li, a pretty young Chinese woman who is his equal in emotional reticence. Jin Li, it turns out, has a lot to hide. A supervisor for a company that cleans Midtown office buildings, she is actually an information thief who works for her wealthy brother Chen’s Shanghai-based company, which has been using the stolen data to make millions in the stock market.
Now, suddenly, someone at one of those corporations seems to have discovered what Jin Li is up to. After two of her employees are brutally murdered and she is nearly killed herself, Jin Li is on the run, and a worried Ray is hoping he can find her before her would-be assassins can. Harrison enlivens this very basic thriller premise with some acerbic portraits of the people involved in the scam. Most of the victims at Good Pharma and its big money backers, we soon learn, are even greedier and more unsavory than Chen and Jin Li, and their instruments of revenge are twisted, small-time killers who make Ralph Cifaretto in “The Sopranos” seem almost normal.
In recounting the characters’ nasty maneuverings, Harrison regales the reader with lots of intriguing details about tradecraft: how to make a deadly and virtually odorless cocktail; how to “lift” the price of a fast-moving stock temporarily by manipulating the international markets; how to smuggle encrypted computer disks safely into China. Harrison succeeds in giving us a chilling, high-speed roller coaster of a ride that doubles as a sardonic sightseeing tour of the seamier side of New York City.