This is the same JOSEPH FINDER who wrote PARANOIA and KILLER INSTINCT and COMPANY MAN, but something happened somewhere. This book is ladened with the author's knowledge on terrorism and intelligence and counterintelligence and the agencies that deal with it. The knowledge is primary and the story is secondary. It is the first FINDER I could easily put down and defer readingt without any difficulty. I missed his easy, dramatic story line. This was not easy reading for me. So I exercised my rights, about 3/4's of the way through over three weeks....and did not finish it. ( )

I liked Paranoia so much that I ordered a couple of more of Joseph Finder's books from Abe Books. ($6.00 for the books at $12.00 for the postage. Ugh!)

This one was good too. Baumann is a terrorist who is sprung from a South African prison in order to colapse the US banking system. The book slowly reveals his plan as he executes it; oh yeh, and a few people too. It was good reading after the Mitnick book; lots of social engineering and clever tricks for getting identification papers. The FBI database guy is equally clever. In summary, an amusing read. It will be a good movie.

Here's his interesting biography from the back cover:
Joseph Finder was born in Chicago in 1958 and spent his early childhood in Afghanistan and the Phillippines. He was educated at Yale College and the Harvard Russian Research Centre. An expert on the CIA and international politics, he writes for the New York Times and the Washington Post and he taught at Harvard. His first novel, The Moscow Club, published to great acclaim in thirty countries, predicted the coup that ended the Soviet Union. Extraordinary Powers, his second novel anticipated by several months the explosive revelation of a mole high in the ranks of the CIA. The Zero Hour sold before publication to twenty foreign countries, and a motion picture based on the book is due from Twenty Century Fox. ( )