Held For Ransom

Russell Atkinson is a former 25-year FBI agent who has now written six books in his Cliff Knowles series. After reading his sixth book, Behead Me, I decided to jump back to the beginning with the first one, Held for Ransom. This book, as the author suggests, is sort of a blueprint about what to do and expect if you or someone in your family is unfortunate enough to be the victim of a kidnapping. There are lots of characters in this story including the victim, Carl Fischer, his family, the kidnappers, and the many FBI agents and police who are involved in the attempt to save Fisher’s life.

Fischer is one of the richest men in the Silicon Valley as the founder and CEO of Claritiva. Kidnapped from the parking lot of his company, Fischer’s family was presented with a demand for $650,000, which sounded like an odd sum to everyone. He was tied up, blindfolded, and taken to a secret location. When the FBI got involved, Knowles was contacted because his boss could not be reached and Knowles was the Principal Relief Supervisor. He was the guy who ended up not being in charge of the operation to rescue Fischer, a job that fell to the untalented and unknowledgeable Peter Stroaker, Special Agent in Charge. And the chase was on, sometimes making the FBI look like incredible professionals, other times showing them to be bumbling incompetents.

After having read both his first and sixth books, it is obvious that Atkinson’s storytelling improved greatly over the course of this novels. In this first book, he had too many characters as he wrote a book that oftentimes read like a script from the old TV show Dragnet – very matter of fact, intense but emotionally tightly controlled. Nonetheless, Knowles is a compelling figure who deftly manages the intricate politics of his agency while finding a way to work the crime. I’ve already grabbed the second book in the series, Cached Out, and I intend to read that one very soon.