The Worst Thing

March 21, 2011
Bryan Bennett, who was kidnapped and held for two months as a five-year-old, has largely overcome that trauma to become a successful hostage negotiator for a Seattle security company in this taut stand-alone from Edgar-winner Elkins (Turncoat). When Bryan's boss, Wally North, asks him to present a "corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar" to GlobalSeas, an Icelandic fisheries company, Bryan, who tries to avoid confined spaces, convinces himself that medication will enable him to endure the plane flight. Even Bryan's discovery that Wally neglected to tell him that GlobalSeas' CEO survived an abduction attempt doesn't deter Bryan and actually motivates him to seek professional help for his crippling panic attacks. Once Bryan and his long-suffering wife, who's looking forward to a vacation, arrive in Iceland, he's plunged into a dangerous situation that puts his sanity and life at risk. While a final twist will strike many readers as a cheat, Elkins excels at maintaining tension throughout and in making his hero's difficulties accessible.

April 15, 2011

The creator of forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver (Skull Duggery, 2009, etc.) plunges the egghead designer of a hostage-negotiation protocol into a harrowing abduction in far-off Iceland.

When he was five years old, Bryan Bennett was kidnapped and held for 58 days while his parents, working in Turkey, sweated to come up with the ransom. Small wonder that as an adult, he's become such an expert on negotiating with kidnappers that he's written the book for the Odysseus Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Security. Now his new boss, Wally North, wants him to fly to Reykjavik to lead a self-protection seminar for the executives of GlobalSeas Fisheries. Bryan's own phobias—he doesn't lead seminars, hates airline travel and still suffers from frequent panic attacks—threaten to make the trip a nightmare even before GlobalSeas CEO Baldur Baldursson, who's already survived one botched abduction attempt, is snatched again, this time in the company of Bryan's wife Lori. The kidnappers, who include the three clueless left-wing ideologues of Project Save the Earth and George Henry Camano, the ice-cold freelancer they've hired to coordinate the snatch, are no more happy to have grabbed Lori than Bryan is to have lost her. Their face-off pits the expert negotiator against the expert kidnapper and inevitably leads to Bryan's exchanging himself for his wife. It's only then that his ordeal truly begins.

A well-calculated change of pace for normally laid-back Elkins, with mounting thrills, a heavy emphasis on self-therapy and a nice surprise at the end.

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Starred review from May 1, 2011
This is the kind of novel that gives genre fiction a good namethanks to its high energy, smart characters, classy writing, palpable suspense, and one whopper of a surprise ending. Bryan Bennett has devoted his life to hostage negotiations, just as a new breed of crooks have devoted theirs to hostage taking. But Bennett is a self-confessed weenie, examining this wretched world at a second remove. Hes a research fellow at an institute, designing hostage programs for somebody else to use. Its how he has responded, he explains, to a nightmarish time long ago when he was held captive for ransom. But during a trip to Iceland to lead an extortion seminar, hes nabbed again, this time by a villain who functions as a sly parody of those criminal masterminds who sip Old Parr and listen to Vivaldi. This guy, who calls himself Paris, is weary of the life but intent on pulling one more kidnapping so he can retire to his sailboat. Too bad he clashes with Bennett, who puts down the Xanax and takes him on. Elkins is a crime-fiction veteran known mainly for his Gideon Oliver series, but this may well be his best book. Its a joy to read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)