The Searcher

Ike Hammer, the majority owner of a corporate intelligence firm in London who usually plays a secondary role to colleague Ben Webster, takes center stage in Jones’s fascinating third thriller (after 2013’s The Jackal’s Share). Webster has vanished somewhere in the former Soviet republic of Georgia while attending the funeral of a friend. At the panicked urging of Webster’s wife, Hammer, typically not a field operative, heads to Georgia, aware of but not fully prepared for the amoral, unpredictable nature of the country and its corrupt power centers. Criminal oligarchs seem to run every facet of society, and it is through them that Hammer must seek help in a search that takes him far into the lawless mountain regions outside the capital of Tbilisi. Hammer proves to be as good a leading man as Webster—smart, instinctive, nobody’s fool. More captivating, however, is Jones’s sensory portrait of Georgia, where human behavior is brutish and unfeeling one moment, big-hearted and gentle the next. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Mar.)