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Other than high-powered law offices and low-rent police stations, the workplace is the last unexplored frontier in fiction.
Joseph Finder has been the exception. With his two recent best sellers, Paranoia and Company Man, Finder has captured how office politics can generate all the emotions you expect in a thriller: fear, anxiety, jealousy, hatred, revenge, guilt. With Company Man, Finder actually centered the plot on the manufacture of office furniture.
In his new business thriller, Killer Instinct, Finder examines the reality of being a salesman, specifically someone who sells fancy plasma screens. Smart, funny and likable, Jason Steadman is a 30-year-old sales executive living outside Boston. He has a good job, but his wife wants him on the CEO track.
The best part of Killer Instinct emerges from Finder's ability to convey how much rejection salespeople get and how they must continually pump themselves up to stay positive and close the deal.
Unfortunately, Killer Instinct lacks the intricate plotting of the earlier books. Jason teams up with an ex-Special Forces veteran, and suddenly very bad things start happening to Jason's enemies at work. What at first seems like a fantasy right out of Dilbert turns into a Faustian nightmare. The veteran begins to resemble an unstoppable cubicle Terminator.
Bottom line: good Finder, not great Finder.
Killer Instinct
By Joseph Finder
St. Martin's, 406 pp., $24.95
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