Climbing the corporate ladder can be … murder! We’ve all heard that cliché before, but when transplanted to thrillerdom, it can work. Joseph Finder has carved a career out of doing so, but KILLER INSTINCT is a candidate for forced retirement, if I were the CEO.

It’s the story of what happens when Jason – a young, hotshot salesman struggling to close some plasma-screen deals – gets a former Special Forces officer he hardly knows a security gig in the electronics firm he works for. The “what happens” part, as you know, can only be bad. They meet cute when Jason’s multitasking while driving gets him into a little fender-bender and Kurt is the technician at the body shop to where his auto is towed. Because of their shared love for baseball (or perhaps repressed homosexual feelings; I can’t decide), Jason invites him to play ball in his work league. Kurt turns out to be an expert player, one thing leads to another, and Kurt and Jason are employed by the same corporation.

Because he never forgets a favor, Kurt decides to repay him by helping him out on the job. The upside is that Jason starts performing better and getting compensated for such; the downside is that it at the expense of his coworkers, as Kurt deals with them in ways that range from humiliation to deadly “accidents.” You can see where this is going; in fact, after the first 150 or so pages, I flipped to the end just to make sure. Yep.

Finder’s strength is in speed; the pace of this novel is as rapid as an Enron stock plummet. My problem with it is I simply hated Jason – the narrator, incidentally – from the get-go. I just have no sympathy for Yuppies who draw a healthy salary, are married to bitchy women from well-to-do families, e-mail on their Blackberries while they’re behind the wheel, talk ballparks to an extent I deem pornographic and drop Business 101 catchphrases like “There’s no ‘i’ in ‘team.’” It all seems so … I dunno, fratty. You’ve gotta give me something to make the guy human. Bestowing fertility problems on him and the missus doesn’t cut it, because people this hateful shouldn’t be reproducing. I was rooting for Kurt: “Yea, Kurt! Get rid of these ambitious, egotistical brown-nosers before all the lower-level employees have their retirement savings wiped out in an accounting scandal!”

Yes, I’m being overly harsh and personal. As the success of John Grisham’s THE FIRM and even Finder’s other novels attests, there is a market for corporate thrillers that will welcome KILLER INSTINCT with open arms. It just reminded me too much of soul-sucking jobs I’ve had in the past, and of people which I do my damndest to avoid, which never makes for a leisurely read. –Rod Lott

“We … watched some documentary on the Discovery channel about bonobos, which are apparently a species of monkey smarter and more highly evolved than us. Seems the bonobos are a female-dominated society. They showed footage of the female bonobo trying to seduce a male, spreading her legs and putting her butt up to the male’s face. The announcer called that ‘presenting.’ The female bonobo didn’t seem to be scoring, but she kept at it. She stretched out an arm and beckoned at him with upstretched fingers like a silent film star playing a harlot. But the guy was a dud. So she went up to him and grabbed his balls, hard.”

Buy it at Amazon.