Chapters For the CEO Set

By Andrea Sachs

If you're looking for the novelist Joseph Finder in a tony Manhattan restaurant, ignore the artsy-looking, bearded fellow slouching in the corner and search instead for the man in full executive armor: tailored wool blazer, black Armani tie and blue Joseph Abboud shirt. Finder, 47, uses that camouflage to slip in and out of the corporate environment, where he researches gripping thrillers set among the world of executive suites and water coolers. "Joseph Finder is doing for the business thriller what John le Carre did for the spy thriller," says Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, "moving it from the level of simple genre to something more complex and ultimately satisfying."

The typical Finder novel (he has published seven so far, with 4.5 million books in print) reflects three or four months spent deep inside a corporate culture. Like an anthropologist, Finder gets to know the natives, interviewing CEOs as well as the rank and file. For Paranoia, he lived among the brilliant rebels of Apple and spent a week at engineering powerhouse Cisco. Why do these folks open up? Simple. "People like to talk about what they do for a living," says Finder. That candor gives the novels an authenticity critics applaud.

For his fast-paced new book, Killer Instinct (St. Martin's; 406 pages), Finder spent months interviewing staff members at technology giant NEC and other plasma-TV makers. The novel's hero, Jason Steadman, 30, is a sales exec at Entronics, a fictional Japanese-owned corporation. Although Steadman is a devotee of military-style business books, he's no warrior on the corporate battlefield--until he meets Kurt Semko, a former special-forces officer who did a stint in Iraq. "He's everything Gordy [his boss] and all these other phony tough guys pretend to be," Steadman thinks. "Sitting in their Aeron chairs and talking about 'dog eat dog' and 'killing the competition.' Only he's for real. He's actually killed people." Semko's swagger leads Steadman into an increasingly unethical and dangerous ascent on the corporate ladder. It's a deal with the devil, as Steadman learns.

A bit like his characters, Finder craved excitement in his career. After receiving a graduate degree from Harvard in Russian studies in 1984, he planned to go into the CIA--until he discovered what the glamorous world of espionage really looked like. "It did not involve false passports or a trench coat," Finder says ruefully. "It involved translating Soviet economic journals." So he manufactured his own thrills on paper. After trying his hand at nonfiction, Finder wrote a succession of well-received thrillers, beginning with The Moscow Club in 1991.

His breakthrough came in 2004 with Paranoia, set in a high-powered telecom firm in a fictional Silicon Valley locale. He followed Paranoia, his first New York Times best seller, with another, Company Man, about the old-line office-furniture industry. Finder had found his niche: John Grisham--like thrillers starring business people instead of lawyers. Finder is careful to explain, though, that his books rely on human emotion, not corporate scheming, for their drama. "They're not about high finance," he says. "They're a portrait of life in the corporate world, with regular people."

At their best, Finder's books are pure wish fulfillment. Like a romance novel promising true love, Killer Instinct moves you deliciously close to the corner office. That's a locale that has allure for Finder. "From time to time, I'll interview a CEO or a CFO or someone at the top of an organization, and I'll think, You know something? I could do this," he says. And why not? He's already written the script.