FORCED OUT
Stephen Frey
Atria Books
Thriller
ISBN: 9781416549635

Forget everything you ever knew about the work of Stephen Frey prior to his latest novel. Frey, the author of a popular series of financial thrillers, takes his career in an entirely different direction with FORCED OUT, which may be his best book to date.

Here, Frey abandons Wall Street for the back streets. Jack Barrett was sitting on top of the world at one time. Working as a talent scout for the New York Yankees, he was looking forward to a well-deserved ending to an honorable career, a great pension and a long retirement. Those plans abruptly went up in smoke, however, when he was terminated in disgrace.

As the book opens, he is living with his daughter in a small Florida town, performing honest but menial work as a grocery packer in a supermarket and drowning his sorrows in alcohol. All of this changes when his daughter, along with the latest in a series of boyfriends, attends a minor league baseball game where Barrett sees the player who he believes will reverse his ill fortune. The athlete is a young man named Mikey Clemants, whose wildly inconsistent playing hides what to Barrett's well-trained eye appears to be talent on a level with the all-time greats of baseball. When Barrett approaches Clemants, however, he is abruptly rebuffed, for reasons he cannot understand.

The answer lies to the north, in New York, where a mob hit man has received an odd assignment. Johnny Bondano, the go-to button man for the Lucchesi crime family, is as cold-blooded as they come, but is possessed of an oddly strict moral code that requires he targets only those whose presence on the planet is a waste of air. Bondano is given what may be his ultimate assignment: find and kill Kyle McLean, who took the life of crime boss Angelo Marconi's grandson in a hit-and-run accident. It was originally thought that the killer himself died in a drunken suicide attempt, yet now it appears that his death was staged and he is in hiding.

As Bondano, racing against a deadline, attempts to discover the whereabouts of the man, he slowly comes to realize that McLean may not be his target after all. He may not have a choice --- to defy a direct order from a mob boss is an automatic death sentence --- yet his spirit rebels at the thought of taking an innocent life. While wrestling with this conundrum, his search for McLean takes him to Florida, where his path is about to cross, however momentarily, with Barrett, in an event that, though brief, will result in several lives being forever changed, with some destinies fulfilled and others irrevocably ended.

Everything about FORCED OUT is different for Stephen Frey. The book has a very street-wise style to it, much different from the financial boardroom tone that gave voice to his prior work. What is amazing here --- I repeatedly stopped reading just long enough to verify that this indeed was a Frey novel --- is how smoothly and thoroughly he has reinvented himself, taking his readers from the world of high finance to this new setting of backstreet boardrooms and downtrodden bungalows.  While this is new territory for Frey, he demonstrates that he owns it. Further explorations will be most welcome.

    --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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