The Katrina Contract

At the start of Nocella’s prolix thriller, a desperate man, on a ship captured by terrorists near Miami, Fla., calls a number to reach the private security company he’s a client of, only to reach someone at a call center in India who speaks broken English (“I will be glad to be of assisting today”). That customer rep insists that the caller, later revealed to be billionaire Danforth Percy Sinclair, provide a seven-digit account number and password before she will take any action. For those who find such an interaction plausible, the rest of the story, centered on efforts by that company to rescue Sinclair, will be easier to swallow. The Die Hard–like plot is derivative, and the central conceit, which involves the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, is nothing special. Fans of action yarns (or what the author categorizes as “high-impact fiction for a cinema-based generation”) will do much better with writers like Duane Swierczynski. [em](BookLife) [/em]