Payoff by Douglas Corleone

Published by Minotaur Books on August 19, 2014

A group of men kidnap Edgar Trenton's 15-year-old daughter, Olivia, despite the fruitless attempts of Edgar's wife to shoot the intruders. Edgar wires the $8.5 million ransom but his daughter remains missing. The talking heads on cable news immediately crucify Edgar, claiming he is hiding the money to keep it from the wife who planned to divorce him. That theory being their best chance of closing a case they cannot otherwise solve, the FBI arrests Edgar, but not before he calls in a favor owed by Simon Fisk, a former U.S. Marshal turned private investigator whose own daughter had been the victim of an unsolved kidnapping eleven years earlier. That crime was indirectly responsible for his wife's death. The resulting baggage is at the core of his Fisk's personality.

Fisk's search for Olivia takes him to the luxurious environs of Grand Cayman, to the slums of Costa Rica, to a drug lord in Columbia, and to Carnival on the streets of Caracas, all painted in colorful detail. The trail leads to dead ends and dead people, prompting the reader to wonder what sort of conspiracy is afoot. Clearly this is more than a simple kidnapping for ransom, but the reason for the kidnapping and the people involved in it come as a surprise -- or rather, a series of surprises.

Douglas Corleone has a realistic understanding of the horrendous failure the drug war has been, and the harm it has caused, in Columbia and elsewhere. This is not an overtly political novel -- it doesn't lecture -- but it is refreshingly honest in its portrayal of disastrous political policies that benefit monied interests while harming American taxpayers and nearly everyone except the drug producers in Columbia.

Fisk is a good character even if his tragic life is a little too tragic. It is a life concocted to manipulate the reader's emotions and to justify Fisk's obsession with finding abducted children. Fortunately, Fisk does not often become preachy or self-righteous, so that weakness in the novel is not particularly troubling.

The story moves at a suitable pace for an action thriller. Corleone's smooth prose never gets in the way of the story he tells. The plot is no less plausible than most modern thrillers (meaning it is barely plausible) but it is entertaining. Payoff is the kind of book that makes for diverting airplane reading on a long dull flight.

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