The Finder was a total impulse buy on my part. Picking up the book in the mystery section at a local bookstore, I was immediately smitten with the cover, a fragmented view of the New York City skyline, centered on the Empire State Building. The cover suckered me in, and the plot--about one man's chase against the clock to find his ex-girlfriend--kept me there.
But there are problems with Colin Harrison's novel. It tries to be too much, tries to tell too many stories. I felt a bit cheated at the end, with the enigmatic and damaged Ray Grant--the titular "Finder"--given a tad too little "screen" time. And while a number of reviewers compare Harrison's novel with Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, in that it presents a cross-section of the Manhattan populace, from hedge fund players to illegal alien day-workers, I think that's where the book stumbles a bit, by trying to cover too large a territory.
The plot is fascinating. Jin Li runs an office cleaning service, the kind that cleans the large corporations of Manhattan each and every night. On the side, she steals secrets from said corporations, moving deftly in and out of the offices as just another member of the cleaning crew assigned to the building. She funnels those secrets to her brother Chen who uses the information to play the stock market on an international level. And then one day she gets caught, and her sideline causes the death of two of her fellow workers, just for being in the right place at the right time with the wrong person--Jin.
Jin goes undercover to escape her pursuers, who want to teach her a lesson. And into that ambles Ray Grant, Jin's former boyfriend, who is "hired" to find her by the very men who want to kill her. The rest of the novel is that story, with all the different tributaries that snake off from it. It's a fascinating read, and as Grant's own tale unfolds, you learn more and more about him...but still it didn't seem like quite enough.
There's Grant's retired police detective father, both a pawn and a player in the unfolding mystery, in his final cancer-ridden days. There's Jin's evil brother. There's an assortment of big business stock market players, including an evil old man who may also be dying of cancer, plus the head of marketing for a pharmaceutical company central to the story. There's the Mafia-related "honeywagon" company owner, who empties out porta-potties.
And from there, there's the author's borderline obsession with...well, shit. Excrement, to be polite. In just about the most shocking first chapter "scene-setter" I've ever read, there's a ton of it, literally. Ray Grant takes a swim in it, a little later in the book. The evil stock market guy has a prostate exam at a party, and yells at the doctor performing it while her rubber-glove fingers are covered in it. Perhaps it's a metaphor for NYC...there's a lot of shit going on there, to be sure, but it gets old--and disgusting--fast.
Harrison is a good writer, and there's lots of fascinating bits here, but I want to see more of Ray Grant, one of the most interesting heroes to come along in a long time. The cover that caught my eye sums up this book perfectly: a beautiful, picture-perfect skyline, fragmented and interrupted by life in the big city, even moreso in the post 9-11 era. Ray Grant's a part of that new era, damaged by it, and living his life beyond it.
Recent Comments