Book Notices | The Fixer by Joseph Finder / The Tomb by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore

Joseph Finder, The Fixer

Amazon   Joseph Finder's latest thriller, The Fixer, is about a former investigative reporter, Rick Hoffman, who winds up living in his father's abandoned house when he loses his job. But it turns out the house has secrets, and so does his father, who's been vegetating in a nursing home for some 20 years after a stroke. Of course Rick starts looking into things and winds up in trouble with various unpleasant characters who want him to mind his own business. The Fixer is a decent enough read, and it certainly helped pass the time on a train ride recently. But there are two things that bug me about the story. One is in fact something one of the bad guys says to Rick in the course of the story: the 20-year-old mystery he's trying to solve just doesn't seem worth risking his life for. It's not even particularly interesting. So that failing kind of undermines the whole story. The second--and here's a spoiler--is that there's a fair amount of attention given in the book to Rick's father's treatment. It turns out that there may be a way to get him to talk, and we anticipate that he'll have something very important to say as soon as he can. Maybe he'll ID the bad guys, or maybe the bad guys will find out about his treatment and make sure he's never able to say anything. But no. He dies, of natural causes of all things, and that part of the story simply evaporates. So the story is not as tight as it could be. Still, it's not the worst way to spend a few hours of your time.

Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore, The Tomb

Amazon   Retired OSI agent Maxine Decker continues to grow on me. In her third outing--after The Blade and The Shield--she finds out about a long submerged, corroded Nazi device that's recently surfaced in Mexico. Whatever the thing is, and despite its condition, it's worth killing for. And as you might guess, Maxine and her former husband, OSI Special Agent Kenny Gates, are on the short list of potential victims. The book follows Maxine and Kenny as they try to figure out what's going on: it turns out that the Nazi relic is tied to a very real threat in the present day, and thousands of American lives are at stake. The main story is interrupted periodically by excerpts from an old diary. A woman named Magda Scarlet provides a riveting account of a personal tragedy. Her story seems at first to be completely unrelated to the modern-day drama that's keeping Maxine busy, but of course it's not. Eventually the two storylines merge, and it's a bit of a surprise when they do. (My one complaint about the book is that Magda Scarlet's transformation is so dramatic that it perhaps strains credibility.) The Tomb is a quick read with short chapters that keep you turning the pages. An entertaining plot, but I'm increasingly in it for the characters. I really like the relationship between Maxine and Kenny: it's a sweet romance that somehow keeps you hooked despite their history. Their happily ever after didn't take the first time, but we're hoping they'll give it a second shot. [Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book from the authors.]