It took bestselling author Joe Finder, whose second Nick Heller thriller, Buried Secrets, will be published by St. Martin’s on June 21, almost 20 years and seven novels to decide on a character with which to build a series that he now hopes will have a long and prolific life.
Private spy Nick Heller is often compared to Jack Reacher or Lucas Davenport, two of Finder’s favorite series characters, but the author prefers to compare him to Ian Fleming’s James Bond “only without the martinis and misogyny. I say that because Nick is a more sophisticated guy than Reacher, though my friend Lee Child and I joke about who could beat up whom. We disagree,” Finder says.
As a young boy, Finder, whose first language was Farsi, lived in the Philippines and Afghanistan, where his Fulbright scholar father set up ESL centers. Returning to the U.S., Finder eventually graduated from Yale College and then went on to Harvard to get his master’s degree at the university’s Russian Research Center. From there he was recruited to the Central Intelligence Agency, partly because of his fluency in Russian, but decided instead to write fiction. “The CIA wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped,” says Finder. “They wanted to give me a desk job where I’d translate Russian for them, but I’d been spoiled by reading Robert Ludlum novels.”
Buried Secrets finds Nick Heller, who first appeared in 2009’s Vanished, living in Boston and working for a billionaire hedge fund manager whose daughter has been kidnapped. When Heller discovers she’s been buried alive in an underground crypt with a camera trained on her, the story becomes a race to the finish in a highly personal life-or-death situation. “It’s a nonstop story that’s lean, fast, and really accelerates,” Finder explains, adding that he’s more enthusiastic about his Heller character than anyone else he’s created. “I have a feeling that Buried Secrets is going to take me to the next level as an author. My instincts tell me that this one will have the broadest popular appeal of all the novels I’ve written, and I think, and hope, that it will reach an even larger audience than the last ones.”
Although Finder occasionally does work for Hollywood, his allegiance is to the book industry and the community of writers with whom he is friends. “This is not a zero-sum game,” he says. “The success of other writers in my genre doesn’t make me do less well.” He has high hopes for the future of the printed book and predicts that with the collapse of the superstore model of bookselling, indie bookstores will rise again. “Remember the MIT guy who predicted in 2010 that the physical book will be dead in five years?” Finder asks. “I’ve got a reminder set on my Google calendar about that. We’ll see.”
