This time, Finder ventures into the world of corporate espionage in a high-tech business and makes the reader feel all the anxiety encountered by the unwitting and inexperienced spy, Adam Cassiday.
At the beginning of the book, Adam is a low-level employee at Wyatt Telecom who gets into some deep trouble, and is then blackmailed by his powerful employer into becoming a coporate spy at a rival company. It is that or jail. He is given a total makeover and prepped by a behavioral psychologist to cope with the demands at Trion Systems.
Adam then must pretend to have been a whiz kid at Wyatt after he is hired by Trion, totally based on his false credentials. He is constantly on edge, spending all of his time attempting to keep up with the demands of his new job while trying to spy for Wyatt. Complicating his life are his guilt about his dying father and the new, elaborate lifestyle which he has come to enjoy. His Porsche, his fancy apartment, and his beautiful new girlfriend are not enough to assauge his conscience, though, and he must eventually decide whether to continue the betrayal of his basic principles.
I did find it hard to swallow that so many of the corporate people were such bad guys and gals and also that Adam would meet his "keepers" from Wyatt in such public places. But despite a few improbable situations and an abrupt ending that left me scratching my head and wondering if I had pages missing, I enjoyed this book and would not hesitate to recommend it. I am certain that it will be a great success.
The story focuses on a clever but bored junior corporate type, Adam Cassidy. Like many, he's got a ho-hum job and is motivated to do just the minimum to skate by. His latent talent is utilized only to pull a minor scam on his high-tech employer (Wyatt) whereby he jiggers corporate budget accounts to buy a Malcolm Forbes style retirement party for one of his loading dock buds.
Cute stunt, but a felony nonetheless. Knowing they could throw his twenty-something carcass in jail for a long time, his employers make him an offer he can't refuse. No prosecution if he agrees to become a corporate mole. He'll fulfill his end of the bargain by becoming employed by Wyatt's rival Trion Systems, the wonderkund company of the high tech world.
Given a fake background attractive enough to entice any headhunter as well as a bag of high tech spy gizmos, Adam is soon snatched up by Trion.
His espionage gets off to a good start, and he is able feed critical information to his handlers at Wyatt. Through a lucky break, he catches the eye of Trion's legendary founder Jock Goddard and gains access to the brain trust of his quarry.
Here the moral dilemma develops (if a book about deceit and lying can have a moral dilemma!). Jock turns out to be the father Adam always wanted and the man he must betray to keep Wyatt from throwing him in jail. What's a scheming junior yuppie to do?
This is an exciting book that is fast paced and very tightly written. Finder is very good at developing characters and at keeping the twists and turns coming and believable.
There are surprises aplenty in this book as the reader is constantly challenged to wonder what in Adam's world is true and what is a careful deception.
This corporate thriller reminded me somewhat of Michael Crichton's book "Disclosure" - intelligent suspense story focused in the high-tech corporate world. Finder is a good and engaging writer who knows how to keep a story moving along.
Adam Cassidy is your typical slacker programmer filling days in a cubicle and nights in a bar. Bored to tears, he tries to pull one over on the boss by rerouting some cash in order to give an overlooked fellow employee a proper retirement sendoff. Typical of most postmoderns, his relativistic views on proper employee decorum (as well as good and evil, in general) land him in deep doo-doo. Threatened with a lifetime of rotting in a federal pen for fooling around with company funds, he sells his shriveled soul to become a corporate spy for über-CEO Nick Wyatt (an extremely thinly-veiled Larry Ellison of Oracle fame.)
Cassidy is tasked with cracking rival company Trion Systems' new project, entitled AURORA. He's coached in being a rising tech star and given all manner of insider info by Wyatt and his cronies. Soon, he's hired on at the competitor. And not only does he spy with abandon, his fearless take on business soon finds him as the right-hand man for everyman CEO of Trion, Jock Goddard (a typical killer app designer who parlayed it all into running a big telecom firm on cornpone and nice feelings, the quintessential anti-Wyatt.)
Now in the top tier, Cassidy starts unraveling the mystery behind AURORA, bedding a key AURORA project manager, and along the way becoming the surrogate son of Trion's founder. But on his journey, he develops a fatal flaw: he begins to love the kinder, gentler atmosphere of the very company he is betraying to the soul-challenged Nick Wyatt.
The tension comes in this book through numerous close scrapes at being exposed, the big AURORA question, the puzzle of cracking security at Trion, and Cassidy's unwitting discovery of disloyalty in the upper echelons of Trion's management. All the while, Wyatt steams in the background, demanding more and more risky spying.
If you've spotted the inevitable double and triplecrosses ten miles down the road, you wouldn't be alone. "Paranoia" is a textbook case of writing a book to formula. You wait for the third scene and just hope it doesn't disappoint. Given that you know the tables will be turned only makes the ending inevitable, but not all that exciting. Deus ex machina plot devices come fast and hard in the final pages--anyone who fancies himself a writer will cringe. It doesn't help that the holes in the plot have holes, either. This is not Shakespeare, folks. In truth, this book is the poster child for what popular fiction has become. No writing craft is here, just calculated manipulation.
(For those seeking to escape the filth-laden novels that seem to abound today, just skip this one. There are enough of George Carlin's seven dirty words--and their infinite variations--in this book to make a sailor blush. Yeah, it bores me, too, to read all that junk. Authors, can we clean it up a little?)
That said, "Paranoia" could be worse. It is semi-entertaining and will keep you flipping pages, even if the ending is prepackaged. Reviewers here who have lambasted the business portrayals in the book have obviously never worked for any large tech firms. Though much of the high tech business machinations shown in this novel's pages seem trite and clichéd, the truth is that much of high tech business IS trite and clichéd. Having worked for large firms in Silicon Valley, I recognized every stupid business decision, every employee, and each single incident of corporate culture run amok. Finder at least did his research.
Deserving of two and a half stars, but since I've got to pick just two or three, I'll let the formulaic nature of this one drag it down a notch.