Guilty Minds

April 25, 2016
In Thriller Award–winner Finder’s lively third Nick Heller novel (after 2011’s Buried Secrets), the website Slander Sheet is about to run a story claiming that a highly placed U.S. government official has had a regular relationship with a prostitute. Lawyers for a top international law firm want Boston-based private intelligence operative Heller to check on the story’s authenticity. Heller says he isn’t interested, but he accepts the assignment after learning that the official in question is Chief Justice Jeremiah Claflin of the Supreme Court. Holes quickly appear in the allegations against Claflin, and Heller blows it out of the water. But it’s been too easy, and Heller’s instincts tell him there’s far more to this case than just a smear attempt on a judge. Who owns Slander Sheet, and what was this case really about? Conventions of the contemporary political thriller abound, but a tight plot, sharp dialogue, and a cast of intriguing characters keep the story a cut above the genre pack. Author tour. Agent: Daniel Conaway, Writers House.

April 1, 2016
Hired to clear the chief justice of the United States of dallying with a call girl, Boston-based investigator Nick Heller becomes entwined in a complicated scheme that leads to murder. Superattorney Gideon Parnell is the Washington VIP who hires Heller. A black civil rights hero who's golfed with all the golfing presidents since LBJ, he's capable of pulling any and all strings in D.C. But he's powerless to prevent the gossip website Slander Sheet from running an expose about Chief Justice Jeremiah Claflin, who reputedly was given three nights with the hooker by a casino mogul in whose favor he had ruled in a recent case. Heller has 48 hours to discredit the story. It's easy enough to determine that Claflin never set foot in the hotel room in which he is said to have consorted with young Kayla Pitts--whose working name is Heidi L'Amour. (The judge has one of the better alibis: he was having electroshock treatment.) But after Pitts is found dead, an apparent suicide, and Heller and his crack team infiltrate the secret ownership of Slander Sheet, unsettling new wrinkles in the case point to an unlikely suspect. The book, the third and best entry in a series, is about as airtight as you can get, plotwise. Heller, a former Special Forces operative in Iraq, is a convincing combination of physical toughness and intelligence--one of the book's pleasures is its descriptions of modern detection techniques. And in Mandy Seeger, the former ace Washington Post reporter who lives to regret writing for Slander Sheet, Heller has an attractive running partner and romantic interest. Finder shows off his top-notch storytelling skills, moving with ease from high places to low in the nation's capital.

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Starred review from May 1, 2016
Freelance intelligence operative Nick Heller, last seen in Buried Secrets (2011), is summoned to a meeting with Gideon Parnell, civil rights icon and the friend and advisor to every president over the last four decades. Parnell tells him that a scurrilous website that specializes in scandal is about to release an expose documenting the chief justice of the Supreme Court's liaisons with a high-priced escort. Even worse, the trysts were paid for by a wealthy casino mogul who has just won a case before the court. Parnell assures Nick that the charges are baseless and asks him to prove it. Nick quickly proves that the expose is bogus, but then the supposed escort is murdered, and the murk and the danger ratchet upward. Finder really knows his way around a thriller, and his sensibilities about Washington, scandal, and the immediacyand threatof digital publishing and electronic surveillance seem chillingly plausible. This is an exciting, insightful thriller with finely sketched charactersin other words, a sure bet in public libraries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)