With Vanished, author Joseph Finder launches a four-book thriller cycle featuring tough, smart, and stubborn Nick Heller. In this fierce series starter, Heller receives a late-night call from his nephew Gabe. The call qualifies as a four-alarm emergency: Nick's sister-in-law has been beaten into a coma, and his brother Roger, with whom he has never been on the best of terms, has vanished. Possibilities, all of them disquieting, flash across Heller's mind: Is Roger on the run or has he been kidnapped? Or is he somehow connected to the schemes that drained $12 billion from U.S. funds earmarked for Iraq? Whatever the high crime, Nick Heller is on the case, and he's using all his Special Forces and high-tech skills to solve it. Pulsing action; plausible detail.
Maureen Corrigan
This is a thriller to enjoy for its Washington locales, convincing familiarity with cutting-edge spy gadgetry and taut action scenes…Any thriller that uses Dean & Deluca's celebrated chocolate chip cookies as an investigatory tool deserves kudos for cleverness. What Vanished lacks in narrative coherence, it makes up for in invention.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Known for his stand-alones, bestseller Finder (Power Play) introduces Nick Heller, an elite corporate intelligence specialist and former Special Services badass, in this exciting series opener. After a frantic call from his 14-year-old nephew, Gabe, Heller returns home to Washington, D.C., from a job in California to find Gabe's mother in a coma and Gabe's stepfather, Roger, who is Heller's older brother, vanished without a trace. Though the brothers have been estranged since their father's much-publicized securities fraud conviction years earlier, Nick vows to protect Gabe and his mother and unravel the mystery of Roger's alleged abduction. The investigation leads him to some disturbing revelations about Roger, not the least of which involves a powerful-and dangerous-private military company. Written in staccato chapters that are emotionally supercharged and action packed, this thriller will more than satisfy adrenaline junkies and have them guessing until the very end. (Aug.)
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Library Journal
Few recent thrillers have as many heart-skipping moments and as rousing a climax as Finder's (www.josephfinder.com) follow-up to Power Play (2007), also available from BBC Audiobooks America. When Special Forces-trained investigator Nick Heller's estranged brother, Roger, is kidnapped, Nick must face off against some of Washington's most powerful forces to find him. Narrator Holter Graham (www.holtergraham.com) puts his significant acting skills to work, especially in his voicing of the truly unique protagonist. The suspense never falters, and listeners will be pleased by the satisfying ending to this complex tale. [Includes a bonus interview with the author; the St. Martin's hc, published in August, was a New York Times best seller.—Ed.]—Joseph L. Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA
