Joseph Finder, The Fixer

Joseph Finder's latest thriller, The Fixer, is about a former investigative reporter, Rick Hoffman, who winds up living in his father's abandoned house when he loses his job. But it turns out the house has secrets, and so does his father, who's been vegetating in a nursing home for some 20 years after a stroke. Of course Rick starts looking into things and winds up in trouble with various unpleasant characters who want him to mind his own business.

The Fixer is a decent enough read, and it certainly helped pass the time on a train ride recently. But there are two things that bug me about the story. One is in fact something one of the bad guys says to Rick in the course of the story: the 20-year-old mystery he's trying to solve just doesn't seem worth risking his life for. It's not even particularly interesting. So that failing kind of undermines the whole story.

The second—and here's a spoiler—is that there's a fair amount of attention given in the book to Rick's father's treatment. It turns out that there may be a way to get him to talk, and we anticipate that he'll have something very important to say as soon as he can. Maybe he'll ID the bad guys, or maybe the bad guys will find out about his treatment and make sure he's never able to say anything. But no. He dies, of natural causes of all things, and that part of the story simply evaporates. So the story is not as tight as it could be. Still, it's not the worst way to spend a few hours of your time.