Saving Jason

Sears’s exciting fourth novel featuring disgraced Wall Street trader Jason Stafford (after 2015’s Long Way Down) finds Stafford, now a financial fraud investigator, sneaking onto a Long Island farm that might be the nexus of some shady stock trades. In the book’s best sequence, he narrowly outruns the farm’s security staff and a herd of cranky bison. But after a colleague is killed, Stafford is swept up into a federal investigation and is forced to go into the witness protection program—along with his autistic seven-year old son, also named Jason but known as “the Kid,” and a pair of bodyguards—in New Mexico, where they’re hunted by mobsters. The high point of this rather too-lengthy section is Stafford’s heroic efforts to locate his runaway son in the wilderness. Back in New York City, he executes a clever ploy to extricate himself from both the feds and the mob. Stafford is a flawed protagonist who is resourceful and touchingly vulnerable. [em]Agent: Judith Weber, Sobol Weber Associates. (Feb.) [/em]