WALLS OF SILENCE

A brisk but predictable debut legal thriller about an innocent man on the run from New York to India and back again.

For openers: elements familiar to the classic chase thriller. Early one morning on the Manhattan’s Upper East Side, JJ Carlson invites fellow attorney Fin Border to check out a million-dollar car that can hit 240 miles an hour. As Border watches helplessly from the sidewalk, Carlson powers the car over a barrier and onto the FDR Drive, killing and injuring scores of rush-hour drivers. Border’s life from that point on falls into chaos. Someone, the bank insists, registered and purchased the dream car in his name with funds drawn from his account. And now not only are the police on his tail, but Carlson’s widow and brother are shooting menacing glances in his direction and the families of the dead and injured are about to sue him for damages. Fearful that his presence will wreck a major merger in the works, his firm shunts him off to India to oversee the purchase of a Bombay stock firm. There, he discovers (too easily) that the India firm is involved in money-laundering, adult and child prostitution—and the brutal murder years ago of his own father. He also connects all of this corruption to the puzzling car suicide. Back in New York, he confronts the guilty parties, who set off in violent pursuit, leaving him, but probably few readers, out of breath. British author Jolowicz, a former attorney and “seventeen-year veteran of the global financial market,” has an eye for the detail that can elicit fear or empathy but is less canny than it might be, and his style—an annoying series of brief paragraphs, short sentences, and terse fragments—further thins the long work’s texture.

Too much and not enough.