The biggest mystery about two new thrillers, “The Intruders” and “Power Play,” is why they look so generic. Their titles suggest nothing but vague, all-purpose peril. The raised letters on their covers scream so loudly that not even a blind person could miss the design style. Stacks and stacks of other books look just like these. Perhaps that’s the point. It might be risky in the world of blustery suspense books to indicate that these are anything special. Even though they are.
“Power Play” was written by Joseph Finder, who does have a well-defined turf (corporate cloak and dagger) and a track record of equally generic-sounding hits (“Paranoia,” “Killer Instinct”) to recommend him. But with “The Intruders,” even the name of its author, Michael Marshall, yields nothing. Nor does his full name, Michael Marshall Smith.
“The Intruders” appears to have a totally standard set-up. It begins with a not-great opening sentence. (“Thump, thump, thump.”) Then comes the obligatory brutal murder of perfectly nice people, in this case a mother and her teenage boy in Seattle. Now meet the book’s main character. He is Jack Whalen — a retired cop of course. An old friend comes to him about the murders, but Jack has other plot strands on his mind. His young wife, Amy, works in advertising. Amy is supposed to be on a business trip but lied to Jack about her destination. She is apparently up to no good.
On a beach in Oregon a little girl who has nothing to do with Jack, Amy or anybody else in the story enters the book. She’s a normal little girl until a strange man appears on the beach and hands her something. When the girl is next seen, she has begun to behave very strangely and doesn’t sound like a little girl at all. And whoa! Mr. Marshall has led this seemingly plain-Jane mystery novel right into the Twilight Zone.
Although there is nothing showy or even stylish about his prose, Mr. Marshall (whose other credits include “The Straw Men”) tells a nerve-racking story full of bizarre twists. That it initially offers so little only adds to its later surprise value. “The Intruders,” which seems like such a ploddingly literal-minded title for a book that begins with a home invasion, turns out to signal a sci-fi horrific strain, one that guarantees puzzling questions about the characters’ true identities and motives. The only sure thing is that Jack Whalen will remain the book’s resident problem solver.
Mr. Marshall recalls Stephen King’s ability to set a story in the world of the commonplace, then suddenly jolt it into a more hellish realm. He also has some of Mr. King’s ability to rivet attention with eerie surprises. It’s not necessary to believe this book’s spooky underlying premise to be caught up in the campfire-tale power of its action.
There’s nothing otherworldly about “Power Play.” Mr. Finder’s strong suit is technical expertise, and he fills this book with seductive bits of inside information. A closing acknowledgment cites those who helped him in the fields of money laundering, hostage negotiating, fly fishing, airplane construction, team building business games and wristwatch collecting, among other things. The New York State juvenile justice system also figures in the book’s underpinnings.
How do all these subjects coalesce? Quite gracefully: Mr. Finder is a much more fluent writer than Mr. Marshall, and he easily draws readers into the mind of his smart young protagonist. He is Jake Landry, a junior executive at a huge aerospace corporation, perhaps on the theory that a higher-powered executive would be less sympathetic. But Jake gets the best of both worlds when he is summoned to be a last-minute replacement on a top-level corporate retreat. The destination: an elite fishing resort in British Columbia. The agenda: extravagant vacationing plus bonding. Jake, whose description of the corporate jet alone is keenly observant, takes a nicely gimlet-eyed view of all the perks that come his way as part of the trip.
For a while Mr. Finder sustains the book with a subplot about an airplane’s design flaw (here’s the place to find out how so-called “chicken rivets” are used) Then there’s the old girlfriend of Jake’s who just happens to be the personal assistant to the new chief executive. And then there are the flashbacks to a shady incident from Jake’s teenage years, one that landed him in a juvenile detention home and presumably has something to do with this book’s opening sentence. Of course it’s a strenuous grabber: “If you’ve never killed someone, you really can’t imagine what it’s like.”
What will happen in this remote setting? “Deliverance” will happen. Armed backwoods invaders take over the fishing lodge, and suddenly it’s very helpful for the movers and shakers to have a smart kid in their midst. For a nice young man Jake turns out to have quite a remarkable body of knowledge about how grenades work and similar topics. Mr. Finder’s detail-oriented regular readers are sure to love the way part of the plot hinges on Jake’s ability to splice coaxial cable (and thus control the place’s Internet connection).
“Power Play” starts cleverly and later devolves into more conventional suspense tactics. But its premise is enough to send chills through corporate boardrooms, and through civilian readers too. Once again the cover art is misleading, even if it aptly summarizes the story by peering through a gun sight at an isolated resort. Mr. Finder’s novels of the business world could appeal to a broader audience than the one for which they aim.
