The Zero Hour

By: Joseph Finder

Narrated by: Jeff Gurner

Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

A breathtaking escape from a maximum-security prison in South Africa. A beautiful call girl found brutally murdered in Boston. A fugitive American billionaire in Switzerland, obsessed with revenge.... So opens Joseph Finder's electrifying suspense thriller, The Zero Hour.

The audio includes an excerpt from Vanished, the first Nick Heller novel.

©1996 Joseph Finder (P)2010 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"A thriller of gigantic proportions, The Zero Hour focuses on villain Henrik Baumann, a suave, cold-blooded mastermind who seeks to demolish the Wall Street computer network system that is central to the world's financial markets. Not only is The Zero Hour a jolting story with plenty of memorable murders and lusty intrigue, its mix of finance, terrorism, and high technology are meticulously described and mostly accurate: such a computer network actually exists and its destruction could disable financial markets. Wow." (Amazon.com review)

Readers are more savvy than the investigator

The prison break that opens the book, and the final take down at the end are the most exciting parts of the story.

Between those you have to suspend a lot of your own knowledge of terrorism, bad guys, and super investigators to get through this. You have to accept a weak, naive, vulnerable person as the lead (best) investigator. You also have to be willing to sit through lots of long, dull detailed tech descriptions, like how everyday things work such as the NYC phone system, airport airspace and what a pilot must do in that space, the fact that handcuffs have universal keys, the numbering system of the relative strengths of various explosives, DHL deliveries, and detonators (maybe not all this is so everyday, but still), as well as repeated explanations of what a computer LAN is and what AFIS stands for. Okay, this was written in 2010, so we need to make some allowances. The tech seems at times modern and at times ancient; for example, it is not until far into the book that the bad guy uses a cell phone rather than a sat phone.

Other disappointments in the story:
1) This hardened, world's best, terrorist criminal has only one way of killing. He also has a soft spot for the kid.
2) The big shocking surprise reveal was not; we figured it out from the very beginning, long before Sarah did. How did she ever get the position she has? She's not a strong character.
3) Without DHL's Edna Mae, the bad guys might have won.
4) Several other characters were far more experienced and interesting than Sarah. Officer Roth and cracker (not hacker) Krasner were capable, daring, and brilliant. Roth deserves his own books.

And then there is the unforgivable:
Chapter 15 about 1 minute in, the author commits a cardinal sin. He inserts himself into the story with a lecture on the vulnerabilities of the US financial system to cyber attacks, and then even uses "in my opinion." Star-losing big tisk-tisk there.

Despite all these many disadvantages, the story mostly kept my interest throughout. However, it is not one I would listen to again, nor keep in my library. People say that Finder's other books are pretty good.