Writing about what he knows, international private investigator Steven Gore has made a smashing fiction debut with the recently published, “Final Target” (Harper).
It’s another post-9/11 thriller that unsettles a reader with its view of the nearly limitless ways in which the free flow of dollars and other forms of currency around the globe makes it easy for a new kind of terrorist to flourish. One who values money as much as political ideology.
Like most Americans, I love much about the modern cash-less society — the ease with which never-seen “money” flows into my bank account on payday and then out to my creditors via a debit card or the Internet.
I don’t like to think about the nuts-and-bolts of having all of my business floating in cyberspace, however. It turns money into an abstract idea with no language barriers and no national boundaries.
“Final Target” is about a U.S. defense contractor located in California that is about to collapse, leaving behind a very high profile criminal case that will make the prosecutors very famous and very happy men.
As the book’s wonderful investigator hero, Graham Gage, soon finds out, however, what is happening in California is just the tip of an iceberg that might involve catastrophic global political consequences.
The unraveling of an ever-widening conspiracy makes “Final Target” impossible to put down, as Graham struggles to save a friend/client who is about to be prosecuted and finds himself traveling to the Ukraine to get to the bottom of the case.
Gore saves the introduction of one of his best characters for the second half of the novel — a world weary, ex-intelligence officer named Ninchenko who assists our hero 
in the Ukraine and gives him (and the reader) a very scary education regarding the instability of life and politics there in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
It now seems quaint that there was a fear the espionage thriller would disappear after the Cold War ended. The dangers out there now might not be as severe as the feared nuclear apocalypse of the U.S./Soviet conflict days, but the ease with which our enemies can operate in a fluid, capitalist world is very frightening indeed.
I can’t wait to see what we else might learn from Steven Gore in his future novels.
