The Switch

At the start of Thriller Award–winner Finder’s enjoyable standalone, Michael Tanner, the owner of Tanner Roast, a specialty coffee company in Boston, mistakenly picks up the laptop belonging to U.S. Senator Susan Robbins of Illinois after going through security at Los Angeles International airport. Predictably, the laptop contains highly classified files about a secret surveillance plan being considered by the NSA. A friend who’s an investigative reporter, Lanny Roth, persuades Tanner to reveal what’s on the laptop and to hang on to it until he, Lanny, can work out a deal with the NSA. Meanwhile, it falls to Will Abbott, Robbins’s chief of staff, to recover the computer before it becomes public knowledge that a U.S. senator not only had classified material on her laptop but that she was careless enough to lose it. Though readers hung up on realism will just have to accept some unlikely elements (such as a coffee roaster as NSA adversary), Finder (The Fixer) once again shows his knack for crafting an engaging thriller. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (June)