Joseph Finder, The Switch

This is one of those stories where an average-ish Joe winds up in incredible circumstances that he has to deal with without any specialized training. Our average Joe is Michael Tanner, the CEO of a Boston-based coffee company, who accidentally picks up the wrong laptop at an airport.

This lands him in a load of trouble because the laptop just happens to have top-secret intel on it. So what do you do when you're privy to state secrets and your knowledge of them is a threat to some high-ranking officials? That's what Tanner has to figure out.

I really enjoyed this book and thought it was close to perfect for much of the story. Certainly the first half flew by. But I had two main issues.

(1) I think that Tanner made life much more difficult for himself than he had to by not immediately handing over the laptop. And there were other occasions too when he seemed to me to make some stupid decisions.

(2) The story began to sound preachy on the subject of government surveillance. When one character in particular (Earle) talked about it, it sounded like we were listening to the author's rant on the subject and not his character's. That took me out of the narrative on a couple of occasions.

(Similarly, I was jarred out of the narrative by this sentence: "He stopped at a red light, even though the intersection was empty in all directions." Note that this isn't an extraordinary situation, where he might be expected not to stop. So this was just weird for me.)