Book Review: Vanished

Vanished by Joseph Finder

Ordinarily I don’t read thrillers. I’m not sure why that is because I’m more than happy to watch films or TV series that fall into that category, but when it comes to novels I usually gravitate towards almost anything else (except the pink stuff). Then, a few months back a thriller writer called Joe Finder started following me on Twitter. Now, all manner of people might follow you, but this guy was a best-selling author and they don’t usually volunteer to follow mere mortals like me. So I immediately followed him back.

And that’s how I found out about Vanished and its private spy hero Nick Heller.

‘Private spy?’ I hear you say. Yes, indeed. Nick Heller is a former US Army Special Forces operative turned private sector intelligence investigator for the shadowy but influential Stoddard Associates. Finder (the name rhymes with hinder, by the way) confesses that the idea for a private spy came about when he discovered that one of his senior CIA sources had gone private. His source told him that now he was no longer constrained by US law he could do more, go places that were once off limits, and generally achieve results that had previously been impossible.  He was also getting paid a great deal more. Finder had been thinking about a hero around which to write a series at the time. And now he had found him.

Vanished opens with a great hook:

“Lauren  Heller’s husband disappeared at a few minutes after ten-thirty on a rainy evening.”

What follows are 400 pages of fast moving, mostly first person narrative, that delivers a fearsomely complex plot in reader-pleasing bite-sized chunks.

Lauren Heller’s husband is Roger, Nick’s older brother.  So that means that this, the first of a proposed series of Nick Heller thrillers, is a personal tale. Lauren’s is one of the intermittent third person voices in the narrative.  I won’t give away the names of the others, but what one of them gets up to would make a pathologist wince.

In his efforts to find Roger and protect Lauren and her son, Gabe, from the attentions of a particularly unpleasant assemblage of people (including the one already mentioned), Nick lands himself up to his ears in global corporate espionage. He has to apply all his technical trickery, considerable combat skills and savvy brain to unravel the plot and extricate himself, but cannot succeed until he has faced his past and revisited his attitudes to both his brother and his estranged jailbird and financial fraudster, father.  This interweaving of the corporate and personal plot lines draws the reader through the book, provides untold twists and turns and leaves you breathless at the end.

I cannot reveal more without entering into spoiler territory. As for me, I’m bitten. I’ve already scouted out some other Finder thrillers in my local book store and I will be waiting with baited breath for the next Nick Heller.

And if you want me to summarise Vanished in one sentence, well:  It’s 24 without Jack Bauer’s menopausal concerns.