Newsletter Archive

Dear Friends,

Three weeks until COMPANY MAN hits the stores, and already a lot's happening. Just got the fourth -- and final -- pre-publication review, from Booklist, and it's terrific:  "A frightfully good suspense thriller." Even more exciting, maybe, than a weekend of NCAA Tournament college basketball? As an author with a national (and international) audience, I'm not supposed to take sides -- kinda like a politician that way, you know -- but I'm enjoying the fact that Michigan State is in the Final Four. Not just because I came to really love Michigan, while researching COMPANY MAN in Grand Rapids, but because my fictional hero in COMPANY MAN, Nick Conover, went to Michigan State.  (Played hockey, not basketball, but OK . . .)

We've still got some giveaways to tell you about, and some more reader mail, and the surprisingly popular Earworm Alert . . .

Joe (Joe@JosephFinder.com)

If you're a bookseller, my publisher has a few more left saved just for you.  Please e-mail Jim.DiMiero@stmartins.com and make sure you tell him the name/address of your bookstore.

Here's my favorite e-mail of the month -- maybe of the year -- has to be this one, from David J. Montgomery, editor of Mystery Ink (mysteryinkonline.com, http://www.crimefictionblog.com), and a widely respected writer and book reviewer in the mystery/thriller field.  Yesterday I just got this e-mail from him:

Joe, let me start by saying, you owe me a good night's
sleep! I was up half the night thinking about your damn book. You know how Larry King (aka The Hack's Hack) writes those awful blurbs like "Don't start this book if you have to go to work the next morning!"? In this case, it might actually be true.

I'm not blowing smoke either... As you probably know, I read a lot of books. 46 so far this year. Most of what I read is okay, but I don't get that excited about the majority. This is a different story, though. COMPANY MAN was a book I couldn't wait to get back to reading.

One of the problems with too many thrillers is that they don't thrill. They might build a little tension or suspense, but they never actually get to the point of quickening the pulse or racing the heart. This book did that, though. It actually made me nervous at times while reading it.

Which brings up another good point. David Morrell says
that the best thrillers are often unsettling. I think that's right and COMPANY MAN definitely fits that description. As we read about this basically good man's world start to crumble around him, we feel unsettled. It's almost painful at times to read as we suffer along with him.

When I first picked up the book, I groaned a little...500+ pages! But as my colleague Roger Ebert says, a good film is never too long and a bad one is never short enough. COMPANY MAN might be long, but it's the perfect length. I found myself reading it as fast as I could move my eyes down the lines and turn the pages.

I should close before I start to gush. (Too late?) I know, though, that writing is a very solitary experience and that authors are always anxious about how a new book will be received. So let me just say that, as far as this reader is concerned, COMPANY MAN is one of the best things I've read in a long time.

Bravo, Mr. Finder.

Regards,
David

Just a short note to let you know I really enjoyed COMPANY MAN a lot!!! Have read all of your novels.....they ALL have been "can't put down" good, great, wonderful...etc....;-). I am a bookseller at Waldenbooks & love the perks of "advance copies".  Thanks a lot, take care and keep the novels coming....;-).
Cordially,
Janet, an avid Joseph Finder addict

Hi Joseph -
Our sales rep first turned us on to PARANOIA (he loaned us an early manuscript) and we both thought it was superb, sold a lot of them (reordered twice). 

COMPANY MAN blew us away. I love the corporate intrigue & characters, well, pretty much everything about both.

It'd be great if you could find your way to Minneapolis and visit our store.

Thank you,
Gary Shulze
Once Upon a Crime
Minneapolis, MN

Gary - Unfortunately, Minneapolis is not on this year's tour, but I'll push for it for next year.

Thank you so much for the Advanced Reader's Copy of COMPANY MAN. I just finished the book and loved it. As a resident of Grand Rapids it was neat to see our name in writing and to try and figure out if your references were to actual places within the city.

As any reader would, I tried to figure out the ending but came up way short. [deleted]. I was wondering how you were going to pull that one off and I must say you did it rather well.

Thanks again, I look forward to reading your next book.

Donna R., Grand Rapids

I was truly thrilled to be chosen as one to read an advanced copy of COMPANY MAN. I've enjoyed Mr. Finder's work in the past and always look forward eagerly to his new books.

And, may I say, that COMPANY MAN did not disappoint! It was filled from the first page with action and drama and continued at a breathless pace until the end.

When a recently widowed CEO of a troubled corporation confronts an intruder on his property in the middle of the night and kills him, what could have been a simple case of self-defense turns into a nightmare he may never be able to escape. But how can Nick Conover do the honorable thing when his sinking company needs him and his two motherless children would be left orphaned? But before he can even make the choice, a series of events is
kicked off that leaves him no option but to ride the story out to it apparently inevitable conclusion.

Joseph Finder introduces seemingly unrelated characters and events with an enviably casual skill and pulls the reader along with them until he can tie them all up in a perfect bow at the conclusion, making you feel it happened just the way it was meant to be. Justice is served after all --- just not in any way that you would have expected in the first 100 pages.

Congratulations, Mr. Finder, on a job especially well done! I'll look for you on the bestseller list.

Laura N.

I rarely plug other people's books here, but I have to mention a new book by one of my key sources on corporate intelligence, Ira Winkler, a brilliant guy who's also a consultant (corporations hire him to break into their own buildings to test the security). His new book is called SPIES AMONG US, just published by Wiley, and everyone who's at all interested in how big companies and governments can be sabotaged or infiltrated -- and how to stop the bad guys -- should read this marvelously entertaining, and instructive, book. You can find it here.

In the last newsletter I mentioned an e-mail I'd gotten from a reader responding to the scene in PARANOIA in which Adam is breaking into an office and finds the song "Band on the Run" cruelly running through his head.  That's an "earworm," from the German Ohrwurm. I asked newsletter readers to write in to give us their nominations for worst earworms, and I got an awful lot of entries, naming songs, many of which are now stuck in my own head.  (As an aside, my daughter's current earworm - she's an obsessive Red Sox fan - is a song by Frickin' A called "Merry Merry Merry Frickin' Christmas (World Champion Red Sox Anthem)." Truly adhesive. Now, a selection of some e-mails on the topic:

Our friend Greg heard "Dancin" Queen" while on vacation in Florida several years ago.  He told us it was in his head during the entire trip.  For fun, we called him and left a voice mail of us singing "Dancin' Queen."  Often, we will simply hum it in his presence, so he gets reinfected with the earworm.
-Dave and Mo
Franklin, IN

the title tune from sondheim's into the woods
-Richard S.
N.Y.

If you don't know this one, a couple trips through the attraction of the same name at Walt Disney World or Disneyland should fix it firmly in mind and ear as the most insidious of earworms: "It's a Small World"
Just typing it has started it playing in my head.
        -Sandi

How about "It's a Small World" from Disney"??
 -Mimi

Joe -
It goes back qite a way, but for sheer sticking power it's hard to beat ...
'It was an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie yellow polka dot bikini ..."    Regards,
     -Ed F.

Oh, "Muskrat Love" probably should be in there somewhere, along with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree", though these days I'd probably be labelled unpatriotic for thinking that!. This reminds me of a game we played on our honeymoon, in a tent with half-a-dozen other trekkers (don't ask) with nothing to do after sundown that would be considered acceptable in a tent with half-a-dozen other trekkers...the game was called Jukebox From Hell. Imagine Sartre's eternal jukebox...
-Sherry. NYC
 
And from the original poster:
i have one thing to add to the earworm thread although
i bet somebody already mentioned it. we went to see
the movie *touching the void* a while ago. this
excellent non-fiction film is about a couple amateur
climbers who have a disastrous debacle on a climb in
the andes. at one point one of the characters is
struggling, leg broken, through boulders and crevasses
and he gets this obnoxious song stuck in his head. it
was a british poptune that i didn't recognize. they
played it. it was repeating at a level close to an
auditory hallucination. now that's' an earworm!!
-moik

And finally, the E-Mail Bag...

The Angry E-mail of the Month Award goes to this guy:

Hi Joe

I just finished your book, PARANOIA. I picked it up in paperback. It caught my eye because it said "There's a new John Grisham in town." I was really enjoying the book right up until the last chapter.

Books have three parts Joe. A beginning, a middle and an end. You have to keep writing allllll the way to the end. It was a lousy ending Joe. Lazy writing. A complete copout. You owe John Grisham an apology. You also need a decent editor.

You owe me $6.99 plus .083 tax. Don't send me a copy of your new book instead of cash. When a writer cheats me, I don't ever read them again.

Best of luck, I hope you earn good money at your day job.
       -Dick M.

Dear Angry Reader: Explain to me again why I'd want to send you a free copy of my new book.  Anyway, I already have a great editor, thanks, and I always like to blame him for anything that readers don't like.

Not everyone groused about the surprise ending of PARANOIA:

I loved it. I thought it was the single best ending ever.  What a cliffhanger!
 -Scott

Who says you cant judge a book by its cover? That's exactly what I did with PARANOIA! I've never read a book by you before, and I KNEW it was gonna be good, I wasn't disappointed.  I look forward to COMPANY MAN.

Great twist at the end of PARANOIA, I found myself gasping in shock at the end.......and I was liking [DELETED] !!.......%$&.
Thanks for a great book!
   -Barbara