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    Paranoia: A Novel
    Paranoia: A Novel
    Paranoia: A Novel
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Paranoia: A Novel

    Written by Joseph Finder

    Narrated by Jason Priestley

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the writer whose novels have been called "thrilling" (New York Times) and "dazzling" (USA Today) comes an electrifying novel, Joseph Finder's Paranoia, a roller-coaster ride of suspense that will hold the reader hostage until the final, astonishing twist.

    Now a major motion-picture starring Harrison Ford, Liam Hemsworth, and Gary Oldman.

    Adam Cassidy is twenty-six and a low-level employee at a high-tech corporation who hates his job. When he manipulates the system to do something nice for a friend, he finds himself charged with a crime. Corporate Security gives him a choice: prison - or become a spy in the headquarters of their chief competitor, Trion Systems.

    They train him. They feed him inside information. Now, at Trion, he's a star, skyrocketing to the top. He finds he has talents he never knew he possessed. He's rich, drives a Porsche, lives in a fabulous apartment, and works directly for the CEO. He's dating the girl of his dreams.

    His life is perfect. And all he has to do to keep it that way is betray everyone he cares about and everything he believes in.

    But when he tries to break off from his controllers, he finds he's in way over his head, trapped in a world in which nothing is as it seems and no one can really be trusted.

    And then the real nightmare begins...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2004
    ISBN9781593973797
    Paranoia: A Novel
    Author

    Joseph Finder

    Joseph Finder is the author of several New York Times bestselling thrillers, including Buried Secrets, High Crimes, Paranoia and the first Nick Heller novel, Vanished. Killer Instinct won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Thriller, and Company Man won the Barry and Gumshoe Awards for Best Thriller. High Crimes was the basis of the Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd movie, and Paranoia was the basis for 2013 film with Liam Hemsworth, Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman. Born in Chicago, Finder studied Russian at Yale and Harvard. He was recruited by the CIA, but decided he preferred writing fiction. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Association for Former Intelligence Officers, he lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Paranoia

    3.5/5

    385 ratings26 reviews

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    • 4/5
      In many ways this novel could be a documentary on life in the United States today for which my only comment is "sad but true".

      A portion of a Wall Street Journal review at the front of the book shares, "Paranoia is a built-for-speed thrill ride. What raises it above...is its author's verbal and satirical flair."

      Adam Cassidy reminds us that at almost every moment of the day we have choices – both in our professional and personal lives. Perhaps this book should be on required reading lists for high school students or at the very least for college students pursuing degrees in business administration. It might help some with their career decisions and at the very least provide some interesting discussions whether one is participating via debate team, book club, business class, etc.
    • 1/5
      I decided to try out Joseph Finder based on an talk I heard that had him discussing the business world with Malcolm Gladwell. This book, the first I found in the library, was OK, but not great. Based on the talk with Gladwell, I'll give him a second chance, but under normal circumstances I wouldn't. The problem I had with this work was that I hated the narrator. I guess he was supposed to come across as street-smart, cool and sophisticated, but to me he came across as a complete a-hole. Given this, I wasn't really interested in how he resolved his problems since my preferred solution would have been for him to have been caught and thrown in prison for the rest of his life.
    • 3/5
      Finder's book is OK and I enjoyed it. 'There were quite a few characters and they were easy to follow. The plot had intrigue, but the main character keeps worrying about his status--I guess that's why it's named "Paranoia". But, that went on too long with many more facets than necessary. I wondered about the ending until it was the ending--snappy.
    • 5/5
      Adam Cassidy got caught with his hand in the corporate cookie jar. He got busted for throwing his loading dock buddy a retirement party like the ones executives get - on the company dime. But, instead of fraud charges, his company sent him into the competition to spy. The premise is fairly lame but the book is great. If you have ever worked in a corporation anywhere in that section from the middle management to the top, you will know this story is so possible that it is probably going on somewhere right now.
    • 4/5
      Interesting dive into corporate spying

      An interesting read that even now still gets it mostly right. There are a number of places where there is far more detail given that this reader felt necessary but it was not so much as to turn me off.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book! Moves at breakneck speed with wit and humor as well as thrills! Life in the corporate world with 3 dimensional characters. Written with authority and well-researched - Mr Finder knows his stuff. A great writer - must get a few more of his books.
    • 4/5
      In many ways this novel could be a documentary on life in the United States today for which my only comment is "sad but true".

      A portion of a Wall Street Journal review at the front of the book shares, "Paranoia is a built-for-speed thrill ride. What raises it above...is its author's verbal and satirical flair."

      Adam Cassidy reminds us that at almost every moment of the day we have choices – both in our professional and personal lives. Perhaps this book should be on required reading lists for high school students or at the very least for college students pursuing degrees in business administration. It might help some with their career decisions and at the very least provide some interesting discussions whether one is participating via debate team, book club, business class, etc.
    • 1/5
      If there is such a thing as chic lit then maybe there should also be a genre called Bloke Books into which I could place this one. I was enjoying the somewhat predictable but never-the-less action-packed plot about espionage in the apparently cut-throat world of Silicon Valley. However in the end (well page 132 to be precise) I couldn't get past the stereotyped, clunky characterisations. I don't think there's a woman alive who would do anything other than groan at this ridiculous sentence, used to introduce the potential love interrest for our luckless protagonist "Sometimes she wore heavy-framed black glasses, the kind that beautiful women wear to signal that they're smart and serious and yet so beautiful that they can wear ugly glasses". Pu-leeze. When, three pages later, he adds to his summation of her that that "this babe...had bodacious ta-tas" I gave up.

      Maybe I am being unfair and there are as many blokes who find this stuff childish as there are women underwhelmed by the modern deluge of chic lit in which all women live to shop and all men are either well-meaning but useless or outright bastards. Whatever the case, I couldn't bring myself to read any more of this adolescent writing.
    • 3/5
      I feel mixed on this one, the sixth book I've read from the Suspense portion of The Ultimate Reading List. It read very quickly, easy reading with short chapters and while the style is far from literary, it compares well against the likes of Dan Brown, James Patterson or Harlan Coben. I know some reviews complained of the style, citing in particular the use of the juvenile and jerky phrase "bodacious ta-tas" to describe the love interest. All I can say is that the voice sure fits the first person narrator, Adam Cassidy. He is juvenile and a jerk. The kind of guy from whom I'd back away slowly if he tried hitting on me, and I'd hate working with me, over me or under me. The kind of guy who used to take pride in how much he could slack off work, he fraudulently uses company funds to throw a retirement party for a coworker without counting the cost, and then is shocked, shocked when the bill comes to over 78,000 dollars and he is told that adds up to embezzlement and possibly decades in prison. Except he makes a deal with the company head, Nick Wyatt. They'll drop the charges if Adam infiltrates Wyatt's main competitor in the high tech business, Trion Systems. A couple of things kept me reading. First, sleaze Adam might be, he's not completely unsympathetic. He's taking care of his dying abusive father, a man who'll never be proud of him no matter what he does. And he does develop a twinge of conscience, some guilt for what he's doing to people who have given him his first real chance. At one point, when his slacker friend Seth boasts of how he avoids doing anything productive at work, Adam asks him just who Seth is cheating by doing that, and I thought he might be learning something. The other reason this kept my interest through over 400 pages was the look at corporate espionage. Finder worked as a Sovietologist in academia and is a member of The Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Each of the nine parts of the book has a piece of tradecraft as its title and is headed by a definition from The Dictionary of Espionage: Fix, Backstopping, Plumbing, Compromise, Blown, Dead Drop, Control, Black Bag Job, Active Measures. The action of each part is an illustration of each word. Finder also evidently did his research on high tech industries, although at times I wished he didn't feel the need to show off all the jargon. So that I mostly found this an interesting ride to the end earns this a three.The book might have earned a four from me were it not for the ending. Other reviews said they hated that ending, but I think for reasons different than mine. I didn't mind the open ending, didn't even think it abrupt, but I hated the entire destination, sensibility behind the whole twist. And it's not as if that twist didn't play fair. In fact it made sense of what seemed gaping plot holes from the beginning. A lot falls into place afterwards. But I still hated it, in a I-doubt-I'll-ever-read-this-author-again way. It's too cynical and too slick, and in its way far too predictable. I hate how it confirms the worldview of the worst characters in the book. For its, yes, paranoid, view of the business world and ambition.
    • 5/5
      True thriller, kept me reading throughout the night. A lot of tech jargon, but it doesn't negatively affect the reading, it enhances the authenticity of the situation. Plus the main character is pretty much in the same position as the readers, so it's kind of amusing. The twists and turns in this book give it those extra brownie points. Fantastic piece of writing, highly recommended!
    • 4/5
      I did not see that ending coming at all. Hence 4 stars.Adam is hanging onto his job by his fingernails after throwing a wild retirement party for a loading dock worker and expensing it all neatly through the company IT. His punishment is to be placed as a mole in a rival company, feeding misinformation from his true employer to the victim, and feeding insider information back the other way. Meanwhile, he tries to gather enough documentation on his mole-ish activities such that the FBI will pluck him from his dilemma if he can hand over his account.I’ve made the plot sound extraordinarily convoluted, but it’s not really. It is very clear that Adam is in a sticky situation of his own making, but that his desire not to go to prison for fraud has landed him in something much deeper. I’m a little dubious about how little sleep he can survive with, but apart from that the character and his actions are well constructed – the difficulties with his father give sharp and necessary relief to the “daily grind” of corporate greed and subterfuge.I have to say, I rather enjoyed the churlish, unpleasant chief financial officer – he was exactly what gives us accountants a bad name, and yet entirely credible and not abhorrent. Other well-developed characters include Jock Goddard, the boss at the new company and the “mole activities” consultant Judith. Antwoine, the enormous black male nurse hired by Adam to care for his aged father, provides a bit of comic relief too.
    • 5/5
      What an absolutely awesome thriller! I loved this book. The story line was superb, the characters were believable and the ending was fabulous.Adam Cassidy made a mistake. He was caught by his superiors at the high-tech corporation where he worked, and rather than end up in prison, he reluctantly decided his only option was to go through with his boss's plan.....to go to work for the competition and learn their secrets.Arrangements were made and Adam became a new employee of Trion, another high-tech corporation, who had a highly guarded secret project that would turn the world upside down upon it's release. Adam's boss at Wyatt wanted him to find out all he could and report everything back to him, or else he would turn Adam over to the authorities for his wrongdoing.Adam becomes enmeshed in his new, high paying job, and before long he becomes a personal assistant to the CEO of Trion. He cannot believe his luck. This turn of events would make his covert job of corporate espionage much easier, as he would have better access to the secrets of the company now. Before long, he gradually starts to like Mr. Goddard, the CEO of Trion. He's a genuinely nice guy. And Adam begins to resent, more and more, his old boss at Wyatt, who is a first class jerk.Although Adam continues to find out the new company's secrets, he realizes that he simply cannot continue to rat out this new boss, because he almost feels as though he is the warm, caring "father" he never had. This creates a huge conflict in Adam's mind, so he decides to stop reporting to Wyatt.As the story moves along....Adam meets and has a relationship with a beautiful co-worker. His relationship with the CEO of Trion grows stronger. His old boss puts on the pressure to report or there will be consequences. Adam is faced with the possiblity of being turned in by Wyatt if he doesn't comply. So he finally decides that he either must choose to follow his conscience and stop the espionage or just do what he was intitially sent to Trion to do, then inform Wyatt that he is finished with them for good.The story progresses with higher and higher suspense, peaking near the end and then a shocking surprise ending that was unexpected by this reviewer. This book was one of the best suspense novels I've read to date. I have moved Mr. Finder up to one of my top ten favorite authors, in the company of Lee Child, Dennis Lehane, Harlan Coben, Michael Connelly, and Robert Crais. I can certainly understand how this book could be good enough to be made into a movie. But I recommend reading this one first. It's a finely crafted tale by a superb author. FIVE STARS!
    • 4/5
      Love Joseph Finder.
    • 2/5
      I hated this main character so much that it took a while to realize I also did not like the incredible amount of tedious detail included in this book. Blah. Just kept reading to find out what sort of horrible punishment this jerk gets - and was even disappointed there.
    • 4/5
      I would never have read this if a company hadn't given me a free audio download of the book. The theme is corporate culture and espionage and those aren't genres I've previously explored, but I did find this pretty interesting throughout. Lots of twists and turns along the way as our hero becomes a kind of double agent, hired by one corporation to spy on another. I found "Paranoia" a little long but overall I'd say it was an intriguing read.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyable although the writing is a bit pedestrian. This tale of corporate espionage holds your interest all the way through, and the atmosphere of a high tech company is fairly realistic, although the technology itself is more than a bit dated, even in the few years since this book was published. (Perhap's that is why Amazon is giving it away for the Kindle.) The bad guy (or the worst bad guy) in the book is clearly modeled after Oracle's Larry Ellison, whom the author must really hate. Some good twists keep this one from losing your interest. Finder throws you for a loop at the end, however, and could perhaps have come up with a better, more satisfying ending. A better title than "Paranoia" would have been "Cynicism". Too damn long, however.
    • 4/5
      Very engaging and relaxing read.
    • 2/5
      Bit formulaic, but a good page turner.
    • 2/5
      I like his writing and I liked this book until I got to the end. I couldn't believe there weren't more pages! It just stopped too soon and I felt as though someone must have ripped out the end of the book!
    • 5/5
      Paranoia is told in the first person by the protagonist. He is Adam Cassidy, a mid-twenties low-level corporate sales guy who got caught diverting company funds to throw a retirement party for one of the foremen in the loading dock of the high-tech company he works for. He did it because he felt sorry for the guy and generally bored with his job. The CEO and the head of security instead of prosecuting him would blackmail him into becoming a mole of the company's biggest competitor. They would train and repackaged him into this smart, up-and-coming corporate whiz and engineer his employment to be one of the competitor's top executive to be able to pass along proprietary and classified information on the competitor's products and on-going projects. Overnight Adam turns into this hard-working genius of an executive and corporate spy at the same time and the pressure of leading this make-believe double life is was putting a lot of stress on the guy. What would make matters worst was he likes his new boss, who treats him like his son, and he fell in love with the woman executive who was handling the project, the information of which he needs to steal. How he was transformed from slacker to a driven executive, his double life, and what happens in the end makes Paranoia an excellent suspense thriller and a look at what extent corporations would go to, to destroy their competition.Paranoia was such a page-turner that I believe that I finished it in three days. It piqued my curiosity of other works of its author.I have read or listened, to via books on CD, Finder's Killer Instinct, and Power Play; and just finished listening to Company Man. Killer Instinct is about this helpful friendly guy turned stalker and deranged killer that the protagonist happened to recommend for a position in security of the company he work for. Power Play is your corporate team-building retreat turned hostage situation. And Company Man is about Nick Conover, a CEO of a major corporation, who had to deal with issues like facing the fallout of firing five thousand employees, fending off the hostile takeover of his company, covering up an accidental killing and being one step ahead of its investigation, a rebellious son, and a crazed stalker all at the same time.I still find Paranoia as the best of the lot but I generally enjoyed them all. What I noticed as common elements of Finder's writing and style are his choice of the corporate environment as the setting for his works and how Finder's protagonists would be this all-around likable guy thrusts in a bad situation, or being in a wrong place at the wrong time. Even if it was the protagonists' fault that landed him in the tight situation he is in like in Paranoia or just plain bad luck, like in Power Play and Company Man, you can't help rooting for the guy. I also noticed that Finder invests his protagonists with family issues, or father issues like with Adam in Paranoia and Nick Conover in Company Man to add depth to the characters and in turn, make his reader feel sympathy or empathize with the character's predicament.
    • 4/5
      Adam Cassidy, a young man without ambition, is a low-level employee in the marketing division of Wyatt Telecommunications. Caught using company funds to throw a retirement party for a dockside worker, Nick Wyatt, ruthless head of the company gives Adam a choice--Federal prison or penetrate Trion, Wyatt’s biggest competitor, as a corporate spy and ferret information on AURORA, a top-secret project that Wyatt fears will be a death knell for his company. Adam reluctantly agrees.What follows is a very fast-paced but somewhat over-the-top corporate espionage thriller, complete with references to the latest in telecommunications gadgets and spyware, hi-tech security measures, and the up-to-date perks of the rich in 21st century US.It’s a fascinating story, and well-done from the corporate culture, industrial espionage, and hi-tech gadget point of view. In his Acknowledgements, Finder lists the people with whom he talked about the various scams as well as the telecommunications industry and state of the art technology: the list is impressive, and includes people from Cisco, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard and others. Adam’s use of the various gadgets and software does not seem far-fetched as happens in other spy-type books; it felt, while reading, as if the hardware and software were based in solid research, and it seems as if they were. It lends a nice authenticity.The writing is not Lehane or Silva, but is certainly adequate to the plot. I had two problems with the plot, which prevented me from giving it a higher rating: there was just one too many high-risk security break-ins-- it pushed the book a little over-the-top for me; as well, the resolution has wonderful twist to it but again, a little too improbable, and there were some glaring loose ends.But otherwise it’s a fine, entertaining read in the genre. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      A page turning thriller devoid of terrorists, murders or explosions. A unique book in every sense of the word - One of the better thrillers I've ever had the chance to put my nose into.
    • 5/5
      Finder Pushes the EnvelopeThis is a great book. However, it should be sold with a warning label. Do not start reading unless your spouse is prepared to be ignored for a few days; your children’s self-esteem can weather being told not to interrupt you; there is absolutely nothing pending at work and you can drive with a single eye while reading with the other.Be forewarned. You are not putting this thriller down until you reach page 423. It is not often an author leaves me regretting all of my previous five stars thriller ratings. They should have been reserved for this book. Joseph Finder successfully pushed the edge of the envelope with Paranoia.
    • 5/5
      Nobody is murdered. There are no courtroom scenes. Nothing blows up. And not a single vehicular chase scene lies between the covers. Yet "Paranoia" is one of the most riveting thrillers I've ever read. Adam Cassidy is your classic corporate slacker, more interested in late-night partying than grinding away in his cubicle at tech giant Wyatt Enterprises. Cassidy's happy-go-lucky lifestyle takes a hard turn when he's caught embezzling company money from Wyatt to fund an extravagant retirement party thrown as a prank for a loading dock worker. Facing the threat of a felony prosecution, Cassidy allows himself to be blackmailed into infiltrating Wyatt's chief competitor Trion Systems as a corporate spy. His mission: to ferret out the details of Trion's most secret research-and-development project. Benefiting from coaching and inside information supplied by Wyatt's overbearing CEO, Cassidy passes himself off a rising star and gains entry into the Trion CEO's inner circle. The tension and suspense mount as Wyatt forces Cassidy to take riskier and riskier actions to pilfer Trion's most coveted trade secrets. With his Trion coworkers growing increasingly suspicious of his actions, Cassidy's situation becomes unbearably dire. I won't reveal anything more about the plot except to say that the ending of this book is as good as any I've experienced in the thriller genre. With "Paranoia," Joseph Finder has taken the basic plot arc of the spy thriller and transplanted it into the corporate setting, almost single handedly establishing the "corporate thriller" as an exciting new subgenre of suspense fiction. And for you technophiles out there, the gadgets discussed in the book couldn't be more timely, with Apple's iPhone and other multi-purpose handhelds headlining today's business pages. -Kevin Joseph, author of "The Champion Maker"
    • 1/5
      Awful. Clearly written by and for a Type A personality. The fact the the author used the phrase "bodacious ta-tas" in all seriousness when describing the physical endowments of the main love interest in the book goes a long way toward describing how the rest of the book reads. For all that, it might not have been half bad had the author not pulled an absolutely *tremendous* deus ex machina out of thin air at the end of the novel, completely overturning what was actually shaping up to be a halfway satisfying ending and making me nearly throw the book across the room in total disgust. Bleh.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book and read it in about 3 days. The author's style and subject are very similar to books by Michael Crichton. This one is about corporate espionage. The story is told by Adam Cassidy, who is quite bluntly, an asshole. He's one of those too-cool guys who arrive for work late, leave early and park in the private parking spots. He knows the rules, but they don't really apply to him, even the ones about not de-frauding you employer of $70,000. Then he get's caught.His employer offers him an interesting deal. They will report him to the police, or he can infiltrate their competitor and steal information. You can guess what Adam chooses. They give him lots of coaching and support and guess what; he's really good at it.The rest is for you to read. No great message, or thought provoking ideas. Lots of useful spy terms are clearly defined and illustrated. I'd recommend reading it.===============Purchasing this book posed an interesting dilemma. It was favourably reviewed as a Palm Reader format book. Purchasing it for my Palm would have cost ~23.00 Cdn and would have been encrypted to my Clie username AND credit card number. Or for an additional $1.00, I could buy a printed copy which I could loan or give to whomever I wanted when I was done. A clear demonstration of the need for better digital rights.