With Power Play, Joseph Finder continues the line of corporate thrillers he kicked off with the magnificent Paranoia.This thriller, though, features as much violent action as it does corporate intrigue, leaving me with the feeling that Finder was writing a thinly-veiled script for a movie blockbuster.Indeed, the similarities to Die Hard are impossible to ignore.Jake Landry, like the Bruce Willis Die Hard hero, is supposed to represent the blue collar everyman caught in the middle of a corporate hostage crisis.Unlike the top brass who attend Hammond Aerospace's fancy off-site at a secluded lodge, Jake's a mid-level manager who's invited for reasons other than his corporate pedigree.When the management team is taken hostage and ordered to embezzle $500 million from the corporate treasury in exchange for their lives, Jake finds himself the only guy in the company who is truly worthy of alpha male posturing.
The plot barrels ahead with Jake and his ex-girlfriend Ali (who happens to have been invited to the off-site as the new CEO's special assistant) engaged in a desperate attempt to outmanuever their brutal captors.Interspered with the action are brief flashbacks to Jake's formative years, in which we learn the origins of his skill with weapons and willingness to tangle with dangerous men.The author also exploits the tension between the new female CEO and the all-male cast of senior executives.
The last third of this book is as suspenseful as anything I've read recently, although the plot teeters in a number of places on the edge of impracticability (how combat-hardened can Jake really be, anyway) and many of the characters are thinly-developed corporate stereotypes.Nonetheless I continue to admire Finder's penchant for interesting plot premises and ability to find action and adventure amidst Sarbanes-Oxley and corporate boardrooms.
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