THE FIXER finds author Joseph Finder stretching his thematic wings a bit, and in a very good way. Yes, there is some high finance involved, but not in either the sense or the themes that he has visited in past books. Here, cash in its most rudimentary form is king, and, as might be expected, the king’s subjects are mad with greed.

The book’s primary protagonist is not a broker or hedge fund manager. Rick Hoffman is about as far from those occupations as you can get. At one point he was an investigative journalist, working as a respected member of the Boston Globe staff. He was lured away from there to a soft and very lucrative position writing puff pieces for a slick local Boston magazine whose target audience was the ostentatiously wealthy and whose publisher handled the budget as if he had a money printing press in the basement. Rick lived the high life on an inflated salary until market forces intersected with depleted revenues, and he was given the gate, his only connection to the magazine being an embarrassing position as a de facto stringer. Rick’s fiancée went the way of his job when the money ran out.

"THE FIXER is one of Joseph Finder’s most complex yet straightforward books. It also contains some of his best writing --- no mean feat after 11 previous novels --- and a number of memorable, if not completely likable, characters."

As THE FIXER opens, Rick is living in the large but dilapidated family home that has been unoccupied, other than for occasional renters, since a stroke all but immobilized the elder Hoffman two decades previously. While planning to have the house renovated and sold, Rick makes a startling discovery: there is a fortune in cash hidden in a crawl space. He knows that the money does not belong to his father, an attorney in solo practice who did well representing defendants but was not Midas by any means. Still, he makes the mistake of spreading around the newly found money just a bit too quickly and visibly after hiding the balance of it.

Rick’s ostentatious display of wealth attracts the attention of a group of shadowy assailants who abduct him and want information, not so much about the money, but about with whom he has been speaking. They give him a deadline to supply them with the information. The problem is that Rick hasn’t been talking with anyone; his father, thanks to the stroke, effectively has been rendered mute, and the former office secretary, long since retired, has adopted a see-no-evil attitude.

Bringing his long-dormant investigative journalism talents to the fore, Rick begins to dig through the records of his father’s long-closed law practice, and uses a thin trail of evidence to start digging into his father’s past. He is not going to like everything he sees as he discovers that there is both much more and less to his father than he ever imagined. That money is tainted, tied into a major part of Boston’s past. Further, there are some powerful people who don’t want Rick nosing around what has been buried for two decades. He soon finds that he is left with some very uncomfortable choices, none of which are palatable and all of which may be wrong. And dangerous.

THE FIXER is one of Joseph Finder’s most complex yet straightforward books. It also contains some of his best writing --- no mean feat after 11 previous novels --- and a number of memorable, if not completely likable, characters. Chalk up another winner in the Finder column.