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Written by Legal Record Webmaster   

By Joseph Finder (St. Martin’s Press, 2011)

I was looking for an exciting book and I found one, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to read the first part just before bedtime! I did, and I had a night of nightmares.
Alexa is 16 and wanting to have a more adult social life than her parents will allow her. She accompanies her friend to a bar (with illegal IDs) and gets picked up by a handsome, Italian sort with the help of a date rape drug. Trouble is that the romeo is working for some really bad guys who kidnap Alexa and promptly bury her in a coffin under 10 feet of dirt. They have provided her with some bottles of water and granola bars plus an air tube connected to a pump. They’ve also placed a black-and-white camera so that it shows her face. When her father sees her desperate condition, he wants to give the kidnappers what they demand, but it turns out they don’t want money. They want a highly secret program that controls all the money for the ‘black ops’ activities of the government.
Alexa’s father hires Nick Heller to find his daughter, and he does, but it’s a convoluted chase where he isn’t sure who is friend and who is enemy. He has a few loyal people to count on and some of them have computer skills that open up doors that just lead to more closed doors.
This is a thriller that I can completely recommend. There’s very little bad language and no immoral liaisons between Nick and other women.   Naturally there is violence, but what kind of thriller would be without violence?