Joseph Finder and the Big Boston Cock-Up

Joseph Finder, The Fixer

Fired magazine editor Rick Hoffman thinks he’s lost everything: job, reputation, girlfriend. Then chance leads him to find $3.4 million in unmarked, non-sequential bills inside the walls of his father’s home. Stroke-ridden, former attorney Leonard Hoffman can’t explain the money, and his cryptic notes don’t help. Rick considers it a windfall—until Boston’s Irish Mafia comes calling, threatening grievous consequences. Suddenly Rick must awaken his disused investigative journalism skills before facts come looking for him.

Espionage specialist Joseph Finder stands out among today’s crowded thriller field, partly, because he doesn’t write series novels. Every Finder title introduces new characters, situations, and thrills, never letting audiences rest comfy on prior successes. This entails some risk: this novel’s premise could’ve turned into the straight version of the movie Dumb & Dumber. Though Finder doesn’t entirely shake the “lucky stiff falls bass-ackward into money” stigma, he offers a passably smart and well-paced character thriller.

Initial poking around this mysterious money uncovers secrets about his family Rick probably never wanted to know. He considered his father just another low-rent defense attorney, a necessary but unpleasant tick on Boston’s kiester. However, Rick quickly unearths not only the remarkably high ideals Len Hoffman once sacrificed, but the depths of his descent. Desperate, immobilized Len has ties to Boston’s most carefully buried mysteries. Some will pay to keep them buried; some will kill.

Readers familiar with Finder’s style will recognize certain authorial hallmarks here, especially the complex layering of secrets. If you can trust anything in Joseph Finder’s novels, it’s that you should trust nothing; not only will everybody lie to you, but the people lying received lies previously, so they’re lying about what they’re lying about. Your understanding rests on webs of deceit. Even into the final pages, everything you believe remains subject to complete, wrenching revision.

Joseph Finder

Rick doesn’t belong in this situation. Half lovable schlub, half capitalist burnout, he’s forgotten the ideals that first steered him into journalism. Glossy magazine work, with its snazzy lifestyle and the gifts he bought his sweetie, made him soft, but the Internet publishing revolution stole everything. When money steals the illusions he maintained about his seemingly dissolute but harmless father, it’s another nail in his coffin: he discovers he’s essentially living in a self-made dreamland.

Philosophers and epistemologists could read Joseph Finder’s work and see dollar signs. Finder regularly hinges complex stories on how little anybody knows about anything except by testimony, and how testimony collapses when people lie. From top-level official stories protecting the elite, to society’s most reprehensible denizens taking extreme measures to keep their misdeeds hidden, some people will do anything to keep secrets secret. “Reality” may be the network of lies we use to protect ourselves.

Even this marks Finder as unusual among thriller writers. Crime and espionage novels generally hinge on uncovering the truth, but that typically means collating facts while piercing the lies. Finder’s themes rely on principles more common in science fiction, like The Matrix or Star Trek holodeck episodes: what if testimonials lie? What if everything we believe is real  is wrong? How can we know truth when everyone around us lies? These answers don’t come easily.

In a largely unnecessary subplot, newly single Rick schemes to rekindle romance with a beautiful old flame. Unfortunately, everything he attempts turns out wrong. She demonstrates unerring ability to perforate every scheme he tries: when he judges her for looks, she showcases brains and entrepreneurial ambition. When he flashes cash, she disdains pretension, reveling in hard work and ingenuity. She gradually unpacks for Rick how, for all his lies, he’s deceived nobody more than himself.

I like the idea of this subplot. It has plentiful potential for guy-friendly romance coupled with the harsh light of truth. If Finder wrote it as a separate book, fleshed out to the degree its premise demands, I’d probably embrace it. However, this subplot intrudes on the master narrative so infrequently that it’s mostly just distracting. It serves Finder’s themes, but not his story, and in a book exceeding 400 pages, it probably isn’t necessary.

Finder’s work flourishes, here and in other novels, where our protagonist struggles between comfortable middle-class lies and harsh, unvarnished truths. Rick could abscond with the money, ignore everyone else, and rebuild a comfy life elsewhere. But, still a journalist at heart, he cannot rest easy while somebody else’s story languishes untold. Truth turns him into a champion of justice, even at great personal cost. One hopes Finder’s audiences might find themselves inspired to similar heights.