House on Fire - Joseph Finder -(Dutton)
There is an almost perfect parallel to reality, ripped from today’s headlines feel to Joseph Finder’s latest installment in the Nick Heller series, House on Fire. Like many of the prior Heller novels this one has Heller on one case at the start and a very different case as things progress and in this case it becomes a very personal one on a couple of different fronts.
Heller meets one of the daughters of the founder of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company as he helps to bury a friend from his days in the military special forces due to the friend’s long running addiction to opioid painkillers. The daughter makes a habit of attending the funerals of those she believes are victims of her family’s best selling medication, the oddly familiar, Oxydone. The daughter ends up engaging Heller’s services to try to track down a long rumored, but hidden study that outlined the drugs highly addictive properties.
The search takes Heller to the family estate for a birthday party for the company founder and family patriarch, under the subterfuge that he is the daughter’s new beau. At the party he encounters another person, a girlfriend from his past and his time in the military, who is also undercover and in the employ of another family member, on the hunt for another set of documents. The pair partner to track down the the paperwork and after ducking and dodging their way out of a hairy situation, Heller’s partner in crime, is found dead of the estate.
That’s when things get really personal and Heller loses his client, but starts the hunt not only for a killer, but for revenge for his late, drug addicted friend and his family. Before embarking on the Heller series, Finder really made his bones as a bestselling author, by writing corporate based thrillers and with House on Fire he returns to the best traditions of those high intrigue, pressure cooker thrills. He is a master of drawing multi-dimensional characters and weaving in returning players,like Heller’s Bernie Madoff-like, convict father who ratchet up the action with their own set of motivations.
The Kimball klan bares a striking resemblance to the real-life Stackler family behind the Purdue Pharmaceutical corporation, manufacturers of OxyContin and those most often blamed for the very real world opioid addiction problem, which just add the dose of reality to this storyline.
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