POWER PLAY

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Published by: St. Martin’s Press
Release Date: August 21, 2007
Pages: 448
ISBN13: 978-1250127785

Series: Standalone Novels

About

An off-site corporate event gone disastrously wrong. The largest ransom in history. The price-tag: dead or alive. Now, in Joseph Finder’s explosive thriller POWER PLAY, it’s up to Jake Landry-a modest, steady guy with a dark, hidden past-to save them all…

It was the perfect retreat for a troubled company. No cell phones. No BlackBerrys. No cars. Just a deluxe lodge surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness and a desolate seacoast.

Jake Landry is a junior executive at the Hammond Aerospace Corporation, a steady, modest, and taciturn guy with a gift for keeping his head down-and a turbulent past he prays he’s put behind him. Ordered to fill in for his boss at the annual offsite, he’s out of his element. He’s uncomfortable with the lavish accommodations and especially with the arrogant, swaggering men who run the company and the only person he knows there is the new special assistant to the CEO-who happens to be Jake’s ex.

Then a band of hunters, apparently lost in the woods, crash the opening-night festivities. Soon the execs of a billion-dollar company, cut off from the rest of the world, find themselves at the mercy of a group of men with guns…and a cunning plan to take Hammond Aerospace for all it’s worth.

But the hostage takers aren’t who they appear to be and neither is Jake Landry. The high flyers hadn’t wanted Jake to come along. Now he’s the only one who can save them.


Praise

"Another triumphant work... truly earns the distinction of 'page-turner.'  ...[will send] readers racing through the story at lightning speed ... A winner."
—Chicago Sun-Times

"Its premise is enough to send chills through corporate boardrooms, and through civilian readers too.  [Mr. Finder] easily draws readers into the mind of his smart young protagonist."
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"The action is swift ... smooth-running ... Finder keeps the plot bubbling and the pages turning.  His bad guys are believably menacing, and Jake Landry is humane enough that a reader can't help rooting for him to outwit all his foes."
—The Wall Street Journal

"A finely crafted excursion into the dark heart of executive-suite skullduggery."
—Forbes

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Excerpt

If you’ve never killed someone, you really can’t imagine what it’s like. You don’t want to know. It leaves you with something hard and leaden in the pit of your stomach, something that never dissolves.

Most of us, I’m convinced, just aren’t wired to take a human life. I’m not talking about some stone-cold sniper with a thousand-yard stare, or one of those psychos who come back from the war and tell you that killing guys was like squishing ants. I’m talking about normal people.

I remember reading once how, during World War II – the Good War, right? – maybe 85% of the soldiers never even fired at the enemy. These were heroes, not cowards, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to aim at a fellow human being and pull the trigger.

I understand that now.

But what if you don’t have a choice?

Read full excerpt