The best-selling author known for his business thrillers ( Paranoia, 2004; Company Man, 2005) here focuses on the aviation industry, as the management team of Hammond Aerospace gathers in a lodge off the coast of British Columbia. The hard-charging businessmen are in full preening mode, showing off their high-end gear and slamming the company's female CEO. Jake Landry, who has been asked to step in for his boss and does not have quite as privileged a background, has brought the wrong clothes and the wrong attitude. When the lodge is overrun by a group of hunters, Jake suspects there's more to the scenario than a robbery, especially since the thieves are toting military-issue weapons. Finder's not much on dialogue and characterization (it's hard to keep all the egotistical businessmen straight), and he throws in just enough tech talk to give his story a realistic veneer. What he does do is hook his readers big time with an irresistible premise: watching the swaggering businessmen cower as a smart-mouthed former juvenile delinquent picks off the bad guys, one by one. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2007 Booklist

A mild-mannered junior exec with a not-so-mild past is the only guy who can save the day when armed men crash Hammond Aerospace's off-site (very off-site) meeting. With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Finder's newest mixture of business technology and pulp fiction focuses on Jake Landry, the sole Hammond Aerospace junior exec attending a company retreat at a swank hunting lodge. He is alternately shunned or insulted by the obnoxious upper-level corporate types until the lodge is invaded by a band of homicidal hunters, and Landry is forced to fall back on lessons he learned on the wrong side of the tracks. Boutsikaris's low-key, amused delivery of Landry's narration is a vocal tightrope walk that successfully suggests enough intelligence to make his aero-tech talk credible and enough edgy cynicism to suggest a checkered past. His timing also gets the most out of the fast-paced action sequences. But his most helpful contribution to the success of the audio is his ability to find unique voices for the executive cadre. Finder individualizes his villains well enough, but he skimps a bit with the Hammond hierarchy, making it hard for the reader to recall one spoiled and pampered blowhard from another. Boutsikaris uses a variety of timbres and tones to give each true distinction. Simultaneous release with the St. Martin's hardcover (Reviews, June 18). (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

JOSEPH FINDER is perhaps the lead player in the corporate thriller genre, a thriving subset of the traditional suspense novel in which executives are both villains and victims. The stakes tend to be smaller here: there's no threat to the free world, no killer virus decimating American cities, no madmen plotting serial mayhem. What there is in "Power Play" is an off-site business conference gone horribly wrong - and we're not talking about a run on bran muffins or a lack of participation in the "trust fall" exercise. The top brass of Hammond Aerospace - a West Coast-based airplane manufacturer - have been transported to a Canadian fishing lodge so far off The Wall Street Journal's delivery route that the only link to the outside world is by satellite phone. But on their very first night, as the executives sit down to a sumptuous feast, they're interrupted by a camouflage-wearing bumpkin who swipes a braised wild partridge from one guest's plate before moving on to finger another's porcini-potato gratin. The executives, so jocular only a moment earlier as they listened to a representative from Corporate Teambuilders outline their schedule, dismiss the man as a half-wit who has lost his way in the forest - until he's joined by a band of guntoting brutes with names like Verne and Buck. In an Enron-meets-"Deliverance" twist, the intruders beat up a vice president and spew bad grammar in all directions before demanding a $100 million ransom. Naturally, it falls to Jake Landry, Finder's wisecracking narrator, to save the corporate coffers, er, leaders. And here's the rub: Landry wasn't supposed to be at the retreat; he's just filling in for his boss, who was delayed returning from an overseas trip. There are only two women present - the new, much-resented chief executive and her assistant, who happens to be Landry's ex-girlfriend. The rest of the hostages are rich white men. And, really, who cares about rich white men? Finder somewhat minimizes this daunting empathy block by including Landry's back story: as a troubled youngster, he learned the value of justified violence, first to protect his mother from his thuggish father and later to avenge a friend in juvenile detention. When the presumed townies start executing the businessmen, Landry's expertise in firearms and head-butting comes in handy. "Power Play" is absorbing yet unaffecting. Although the story is slow to take off, once the seaplanes land in front of the lodge the pace gallops relentlessly. None of the characters have very much depth, partly because the dashing lead is sure to prevail. Several of Finder's previous thrillers have been optioned by Hollywood, and "Power Play," with its dialogue-driven narrative, seems best suited to the same big-screen treatment. I suppose the real rush to be gotten from thrillers comes from their inspired problem solving. Being inside the narrator's head as he coolly escapes one predicament after another might lull readers into concluding that none of their own workaday problems are insurmountable - not that lost account, not that totaled company car, not that annoying new boss. And if all else fails, a strategic head butt might just do the trick. In an Enron-meets-'Deliverance' twist, a group of business executives is tormented by gun-toting brutes. Julia Scheeres, the author of a memoir, "Jesus Land," is at work on a novel.