Saving Jason

December 7, 2015
Sears’s exciting fourth novel featuring disgraced Wall Street trader Jason Stafford (after 2015’s Long Way Down) finds Stafford, now a financial fraud investigator, sneaking onto a Long Island farm that might be the nexus of some shady stock trades. In the book’s best sequence, he narrowly outruns the farm’s security staff and a herd of cranky bison. But after a colleague is killed, Stafford is swept up into a federal investigation and is forced to go into the witness protection program—along with his autistic seven-year old son, also named Jason but known as “the Kid,” and a pair of bodyguards—in New Mexico, where they’re hunted by mobsters. The high point of this rather too-lengthy section is Stafford’s heroic efforts to locate his runaway son in the wilderness. Back in New York City, he executes a clever ploy to extricate himself from both the feds and the mob. Stafford is a flawed protagonist who is resourceful and touchingly vulnerable. Agent: Judith Weber, Sobol Weber Associates.

December 1, 2015
Sophisticated sleuth Jason Stafford gets drawn into a mysterious corporate takeover plot in Sears' (Long Way Down, 2015, etc.) latest high-finance thriller. During a slow office day, Stafford notices the firm he works for has been subject to a run of low-return "penny trades," all of which trace to the same rural address. All he finds at the location are a field of trucks and a herd of charging buffalo, which he must escape on foot. Before Stafford can discover the significance of the trades, his trouble escalates: the firm wants him out, a shady lawyer tries to put him back in jail for a previous insider trading charge, and hired thugs pursue him in a near-fatal chase on the Long Island Expressway. Now his only option is to become a protected witness, but while in custody, his autistic son, known as The Kid, is abducted; this prompts yet another potentially deadly chase. Once he unravels an impending hostile takeover, he employs some complex negotiations to draw out the perpetrators. As usual in this series, Sears alternates high-stakes action sequences--which show his hero to be in improbably great physical shape--with slower-paced boardroom scenes that are often highly technical. While the chases are fun, the financial action may leave the reader as confused as Stafford sometimes gets himself. You don't need a background in economics to get drawn into this thriller, but it probably helps.

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Starred review from February 15, 2016
Through four novels, Sears has shown he'll go to astonishing lengths to avoid making his hero, Jason Stafford, one more cookie-cutter PI. Stafford is mourning a murdered ex-wife. He's an ex-con redeeming himself by advising good guys. But he's also raising, by himself, a young autistic son, and it's a tribute to the author's skill that the scenes with the Kid augment, rather than scuttle, the thriller plot. Another mark of this quest for the unusual has Stafford confronting a field of menacing bison as he's examining a crime scene. Yes, it's gloriously bizarre, but it also works; those bison have a reason to be there. Sears delicately intertwines three distinct plot strands here. The firstthe one with the bisonhas him clashing with the Mob. In the second, he and the Kid are dealing with life under witness protection in New Mexico. Finally, a possible kidnapping leads to a tense, beautifully written search across the scorched desert. Wait a minute: let's not forget the high-speed chase. Just another chase? Hardly. Sears outdoes himself by giving the role of the chase cars to two lumbering tractor trucks. Bison and speeding tractor trucksthere are two things crime readers don't come across very often.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2015

Jason Stafford, the Wall Street trader-turned prison inmate-turned financial investigator first seen in Black Fridays, is swept up in a grand jury investigation of mob-related activities on Wall Street and placed in the witness protection program. Then his autistic son disappears.

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