In life, things go wrong and things go right, with judgement and emotion providing the force to keep us together or make us fall apart. In his twelfth novel, author Tim Green, the former host of "A Current Affair," departs from his early football thrillers and brings us something else he knows well: the life and times of an investigative reporter for a successful TV show, his fictional "American Outrage."

The right part of correspondent Jake Carlson's life is his professional success and the beloved thirteen year old son Sam who he and his wife adopted as an infant. The wrong side is the recent loss of his wife and the rebelliousness this tragedy has inspired in Sam's behavior, at school and at home. As a father who may love his son enough to allow him too much, Jake is nothing if not permissive, even when Sam is suspended following a third schoolyard fracas during which he'd bitten another boy. The only thing keeping the lad from expulsion is the requirement that he maintains regular sessions with the school psychologist, Dr. Stoddard.

Juggling his TV assingments from boss Joe Katch, his interviews, his antagonistic relationship with his oversize producer Conrad Muldoon, Jake manages to put stories together for his broadcasts while attending to Sam's needs. Following Sam's first meeting with Dr. Stoddard, Jake is made to realize how desperate Sam is to find his birth mother and for Jake to use all his research resources to help.

From the moment Jake agrees to do it, his professional duties take something of a back seat to the quest as he responds to Sam's incessant, tunnel-visioned demands. Marshalling all his investigative skill and Sam's expertise with computers, the trail leads to the group of Albanian thugs who were and still are a part of an international crime syndicate and who controlled Sam's adoption thirteen years before.

It isn't long before Jake's inquiries lead to a liason with Zamira, an exotic beauty with a long scar on her face, who proves she's in league with the Albanians when she drugs Jake's drink. If he doesn't know by now how close he's getting to the people who can provide information on Sam's birth mother, the death threats that follow leave no doubt about the risks he's taking and danger he's putting Sam in.

Not only can't Jake accomodate the idea of backing off, he allows Sam to participate in the field investigation, even as it leads to close contact with the violent leader of the child trafficking ring and thence to the enormously wealthy and sleazily corrupt Van Buren family who may have made the adoption possible in the first place.

Green moves the story along on a high level of tension and pace with great detail, a fascinating complexity, a wide cast of characters and, with all that, economy. If there's a back side to that, it's the facile, rather slick story development in which transitions can be instantaneous.

The bigger shock might be the full participation of the thirteen-year old boy in abandoned warehouses, traveling alone, general willfullness, no sense of the selfish, self-gratifying intrusion on a woman who might or not be his real mother that his single-minded tracking amounts to. Add to that his bratty insistence on following dad into potential ambush scenes despite a parental demand to the contrary and the almost annoying and consistent acceptance by dad. To a certain extent, Green strains credulity for the sake of heightened drama.

This book comes off clearly as an adventure yarn for teenage boys who might find great satisfaction with a character who exhibits extreme rebelliousness and control over a parent. It isn't just an adult mystery, though this might be of no concern to many readers. For me, it cast a cautionary, detrimental shading to my reading of an otherwise good piece of work that conveys an insider's intimate knowledge of working for a TV newsmagazine which Green masterfully integrates into a complex scheme to build tension and hold it to the climactic end.