Book review: 'The Finder'

As I plan an upcoming trip to New York, thinking of the show I want to see, the museum I hope to visit, I am inhabiting a fantasy world that has nothing at all to do with the profoundly corrupt, dangerous New York of Colin Harrison's brilliant, cynical new literary thriller. "The Finder" is a panoramic look at the linked lives of perhaps a dozen characters, from billionaire financiers to Mafia thugs, from Mexican teenagers to society matrons.

As a study of a decadent, rapidly declining New York, "The Finder" somewhat recalls Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," but this is a far darker story and, to my mind, a far more interesting one. Harrison's Big Apple is rotten to the core.

We start with an attractive Chinese woman named Jin Li. She's a supervisor for a company that picks up wastepaper from Manhattan offices in the middle of the night and shreds and disposes of it. After work one night, she and two young Mexican women climb into an old Toyota for a pre-dawn drive to a beach in Brooklyn. But they've been followed. While Jin Li wanders off to relieve herself, a huge truck pulls up beside the Toyota. Two men block its doors and force a hose through its sunroof. Within minutes, raw sewage fills the car and suffocates the other women. Jin Li, realizing that the killers were actually after her, flees.

We move to the seats directly behind home plate at Yankee Stadium. The people there are hugely smug about their little world. A man named Tom Reilly, kingpin of a drug company called Good Pharma, is wooing a potential investor. Then someone hands him a threatening note, and he, too, flees.

We meet the novel's hero, Ray Grant, a New York firefighter who was almost killed in the collapse of the twin towers. He has taken leave and traveled the world but returned to Brooklyn to care for his father, who's dying of cancer. Grant, we learn, had an affair with Jin Li. We also learn that she's no innocent. She's been running the wastepaper business for her brother, Chen, a Shanghai financier. She goes through the waste and pulls out financial documents that have enabled him to make millions. In fact, documents she's stolen have sent Good Pharma's stock into a tailspin, much to the annoyance of Bill Martz, a billionaire investor. Martz in time will kidnap Chen as a complex scheme to force Good Pharma's stock back up.

A whole other level of criminality exists in the person of mob-connected Victor Rigetti, who owns Victorious Sewerage and was a middleman in the killing of the Mexican women. At other times Vic beats a man to death with a golf club, slips a Mafia colleague a fatal cocktail and terrorizes Jin Li. Let us note that the Mexicans were killed with raw sewage; that Ray Grant, in his search for Jin Li, is forced to crawl through a horrid sewer to find evidence; and that Rigetti's criminal operations are built on the sewage business. The symbolism is not subtle: New York, for all its glories, is at bottom a cesspool.

Yes, this is a dark, violent novel, but it is also a delightful one because Harrison knows so much and writes so well. The flashback in which Grant and a fellow firefighter, who is dying, are trapped under tons of concrete when one of the towers comes down is powerful, and exchanges between Grant and his dying father remind us that decency still exists in certain corners of Brooklyn.

"The Finder"

Author: Colin Harrison

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25