Douglas Corleone: Good as Gone

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Chase to find a missing child
This is a fast moving chase to find a missing child who has been abducted for no apparent reason by someone unknown to the family.

Former US Marshal Simon Fisk hunts down children who have been taken illegally by an estranged parent. He doesn't normally touch abduction by strangers because he is continually haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his six year old daughter which triggered his wife's suicide.

Fisk has a big dilemma because the French police want to charge him with past misdemeanors when he tracked down parents who had fled to their country. They offer to drop the charges if he will help them with a high profile stranger abduction case of six year old Lindsay Sorkin from a luxury Paris hotel. Her father is a key partner in a Silicon Valley startup that is designing remote-controlled automation that could potentially replace soldiers in the battlefield. After finding himself closely related to the impact on the parents, Fisk reluctantly agrees to try to find the trail of the abduction.  This leads him into the dangerous underworlds of France, Germany, Poland and Belarus.

Along the way Fisk meets beautiful Polish attorney Ana Staszak whose boss Mikolaj Dabrowki is implicated in the abduction through his close association with notorious Polish gangsters who he has successfully defended.  Ana joins Simon in the dangerous chase to find Lindsay which moves from country to country and they have to deal with some of the worst criminals in Europe and Russia who are involved with drugs, prostitution, child pornography and sex slavery.

The first part of the book was exciting and compassionate as Fisk starts to find the trail. The second part went downhill with me because it became over the top, with continual violence as Fisk catches up and deals with the many gangsters who are involved with the abduction. It was also very difficult to follow some of the Eastern European names.

I enjoyed the first part of the book but got lost in the escapism of the second part. Thriller writing is becoming more competitive especially with the upcoming throng of talented self-published authors and some established authors are turning to more unusual plots to keep their lead. This was one of the "one man can beat many" syndrome plots that are too over the top and quickly lose my attention.