Beyond Gone

Corleone’s unconvincing fourth Simon Fisk thriller (after 2015’s Gone Cold) takes Fisk, a PI who specializes in overseas abduction cases of children by noncustodial parents, to South Africa, ostensibly to retrieve a Staten Island schoolteacher’s son, only to find that he’s been set up by U.S. Secretary of State James Coleman. Coleman’s 16-year-old granddaughter, Kishana, “a Peace Corps volunteer posing as a Sudanese aid worker with no ties to the United States,” was one of the victims of a recent mass abduction of girls from a Christian enclave in Nigeria. The secretary offers “the best psychiatric counseling in the Western hemisphere” for Fisk’s traumatized 19-year-old daughter, Hailey (she was kidnapped as a child and years later suspected of murder), as well as a free ride to the college of her choice, if he agrees to save Kishana from her terrorist captors. Fisk accepts, despite the daunting nature of the mission. Strained similes (the “brakes screeched like a pack of rabid hell hounds”) don’t help. Readers who prize action over logic may find something to enjoy. (May)