BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Fixer’

OPINION:

THE FIXER

By Joseph Finder

Dutton, $28, 384 pages

Finding an enormous amount of money in what used to be your old home sounds like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There is a graceful kickoff in the listing about a “1903 Queen Anne home — graciously proportioned rooms and elegant millwork.”

The erstwhile owner comments bitterly, “The house was a dump.” He notes that that the listing had produced one offer so lowball that the real estate agent refused to dignify it with a reply. Of course, what wasn’t mentioned were the rolls of hundred-dollar banknotes hidden in the walls.

Rick Hoffman, a broke and out of work writer who grew up in the house, isn’t optimistic about doing anything with it except squatting in it until he finds something better. Then he finds the money and almost simultaneously finds himself living in a nightmare. The tragedy of it is that his ailing father holds the key to the mystery and can’t remember what it is. And those who can remember are bent on killing the young Hoffman.

Joseph Finder has written a tense, fast-moving thriller bearing the warning that there may be things you don’t know and should know about your family. As details of the past trickle out, the peril increases for Hoffman because the truth is not only buried in his father’s clouded mind, it is preoccupying the minds of corrupt and ruthless men who are prepared to do anything not only to retrieve the money but to protect a major corporate scandal in which Hoffman’s father, Lenny, was so deeply and dangerously involved that it almost cost his life.

Rick Hoffman briefly behaves like a fool by hiding the money, all three-and-a-half million of it, in a bank deposit box, and buying a $4,000 dinner, which turns out to embarrass his girlfriend instead of impress her. Then the facts — and the beatings — set in. The men who crippled his father have a new target and he doesn’t even know why. He seeks help from his father, now mentally lost in a nursing home and begins to put together a scenario that tells him that his father was respected as a fixer but not in the criminal sense of the word. He discovers how his father fought the cover-up of a scandal involving a family killed in a tunnel disaster. Those who kept the secret were paid off, from the police to the survivors, and Lenny Hoffman had paid a price that took his mind.

The plot takes its most intriguing turn when Rick Hoffman finds who his father was and what his principles were. The book moves from a thriller to a psychological study of a father and son who never knew each other until it was too late. Leonard Hoffman knew how to keep secrets, but what was more important was that he knew what secrets could never be kept. It is in the course of finding a letter in which his father defended him for exposing the plagiarism of a tutor that Rick realizes how little he had appreciated the tight-lipped older man. It is that discovery that makes him realize that he cannot accept the easy and profitable way out offered by the men his father opposed. It is an unexpected twist in what until then is a run of the mill mystery, because the reader suddenly realizes what his revelations mean to a young man prepared to sell himself. It turns the book into something different.

The sophisticated and ruthless philosophy of a philanthropist outlines what “thinking big” means and its cost. He tells Rick that the world is “full of small men who want to tie the great ones down.” A few lives were worth the cost of enormous and challenging construction projects, he points out, and notes how many died building huge dams and canals. Great engineering feats took precedence over their cost, he insists.

Eventually, Rick Hoffman comes to terms with the father he never knew or appreciated, but there is nothing simple about how he reaches that decision. The question is whether he can live up to him.

• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.