TRAPS

After the sprawling pleasures of international intrigue (The Führer’s Reserve, 2000), Lindsay’s back doing what he does best: putting the FBI under the gun.

When émigré Croatian engineer Conrad Ziven’s teenaged daughter Leah was kidnapped, he paid the ransom demanded—his valuable stamp collection—and contacted the authorities. But he never saw Leah again. Eventually the local office stopped even returning his calls, and his only contact with law enforcement came when the Chicago police arrested his despairing wife for forging drug prescriptions. Now, on the third anniversary of Leah’s abduction, he plans to goad the Bureau into taking the case more seriously by planting a formidable-looking bomb outside the Cook County jail, where its detonation could level the prison and kill hundreds of inmates who can’t be evacuated. Through a series of accidents and coincidences, the price for Ziven’s disarming the bomb—the truth about his daughter’s fate and justice for whatever happened to her—becomes the joint responsibility of Jack Kincade, a veteran FBI agent so deep in hibernation (his mantra is “Don’t give a good goddamn”) that he emerges from his nights of drinking and poker only long enough to set traps inside night depositories to catch bank deposits for his own personal use, and Ben Alton, just returning to the job after cancer took his leg and apparently destined him for a desk job: improving the local bureau’s clearance rate on bank robberies. The stage seems set for a cat-and-mouse game pitting Kincade and Alton against the downtrodden bomber, but after working the mano-a-meno angle cunningly for a few chapters, Lindsay abruptly heads out into deeper waters and ends up with something altogether scarier, deeper, and finer.

Beneath the expertly handled action-film conventions, Lindsay rings virtuoso changes on the kinds of traps the best and worst men set for each other and themselves.