My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fantastic read by the master of suspense.
The story follows a coasting through life, Adam Cassidy who pulls a stunt at his work and expects to get fired for it. Instead, he gets pulled into a world of corporate espionage and is forced to become a puppet.
In all of Finder’s books that I’ve read, he always puts his characters in situations where they very nearly (or actually) get caught. The way he does this creates suspense like no one else I’ve read.
One of my favourite scenes was when Adam spends a lot of time on a PowerPoint presentation, adding all sorts of animations and impressive slides, only to get shouted at and ‘get to the point’. Anyone working in a corporate atmosphere will have chuckled as much as I did.
I also enjoyed the fact that the story ends on a question mark.
Format
I read this on audiobook. The narrator, Scott Brick, is an audiobook veteran. The story is linear and simple enough to be an ideal audiobook.
Themes
To me, this book was about family, how people deal with loss and, of course, corporate greed. It had more feelings than I thought. There was a particular scene that nearly had me in tears:
’You think you’ve got it all figured out, right? Until god sends you a little telegram saying ‘oh, forgot to mention none of that means a thing. And everyone you love on this earth, they’re really just on loan, you see. And you’d better love them while you can.’’
Notable issues
Very minor point but I’ve no idea why this book is called Paranoia. To me it should’ve been called ‘Espionage’ or something like that.
Final thought
Finder is the master of suspense. There is no one that creates an ‘edge of your seat’ reading experience quite like Finder. The other books of his that I’ve read have been the same and I’ll be reading more of his works very soon. A great page-turner, well written.
And that ending! Honestly, I did not see it coming.
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