It's maybe not the kind of thing your average male thinks about when he meets an outrageously beautiful woman... "is she right for me? Am I and my family safe with her?" Such thoughts would never have entered Nick Conover's mind if it weren't for the fact that he shot her father to death. So, the more trenchant question is, "does she know?"

She doesn't act as though she does, so Nick is free to become totally infatuated with her physical attributes and her savant's power to understand people and their motivations with acute insight. She even helps Nick understand the private agendas going on at the Stratton Corporation, where he's the young, attractive CEO who lost his wife in a tragic car accident a year ago.

He's also the guy who laid off half the workers in a downsizing attempt to keep the company afloat, earning him the local sobriquet of "Slasher Nick" and changing him from a small town hero to the most hated figure of the small community. So, it made some morbid sense when his mansion domain in the gated community of Fenwicke Estates was broken into by a disgruntled nighttime marauder who left day-glo messages on the wall saying, "NO HIDING PLACE" in all caps.

When the "wing nut" intruder escalates to killing the family dog, Nick calls in Eddie Rinaldi, his company's security director, a guy with a cop background and something of a moral disaster. Ever helpful to his boss, Rinaldi puts a throwdown gun in Nick's possession. When Nick later finds laid-off worker Andrew Stadler on the lawn approaching his house, he assumes him to be the dog killer and demands he come no closer. When the maniac rushes toward him spouting nonsense, Nick shoots him dead.

The shock waves brings him back to Rinaldi who embroils him in a desperate coverup that's too clever for its own good. When the dead body shows up in a dumpster in a bad neighborhood, wrapped up and wiped clean, it brings on law enforcement in the form of Officer Audrey Rhimes, an African American detective who pursues a case like a worker bee.

Nick, trying to change his reputation as a CEO without a heart, bends company policy and goes to Cassie Stadler to personally deliver a bundle of compensation money to demonstrate his feelings over her tragic loss and finds himself in an irresistible attraction for the first time since his wife died.

Author Finder writes big books. This 528 thriller isn't lengthy because of overelaboration or excess poetic description, however. In fact, it's a taut suspense journey without a wasted word. It grows into an extended entertainment because Finder fully explores the psychological motivations of every character and because he's dealing with the complexities of a hero who's both powerful and modest.

The man's abiding interest is in managing his company and in protecting his two children, rebellious teenager Lucas who is becoming a drug addict, and dependent little Julia. He's dealing with a huge coverup by the officers of his corporation who are keeping him in the dark, with parenting ineffectually, with his newfound romance, his security officer's misjudgements and subsequent threats, and with the intrusions of a zealous detective. With all these balls in the air, there isn't a wasted sentence between the covers.

Where John Grisham mines his legal specialty for unique dramatic enrichment of his fiction; and where Shelly Reuben uses her arson expertise, Joseph Finder finds his mystery story niche within the corporate world. In all these cases, the setting is never convenient coincidence but a carefully crafted element of the crimes and the crises. Nick Conover couldn't have existed outside the culture of a global business any more than his low-level-employee hero Adam Cassidy could have in his earlier corporation thriller, "Paranoia." Finder, then, knows his way around corporate boardrooms. His genius in this enterprise is in exploiting the global and domestic tension within a single, very flawed but human protagonist who is both up to the challenges of his job and way over his head in dealing with the tragedies in his life.

For the pleasures he creates within this complex framework, we give Joseph Finder a well deserved vote of confidence, a raise, and maybe a golden parachute.