The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

Overview

For Bryan Bennett, designing hostage negotiation programs is the perfect job—as long as he doesn’t deal directly with kidnappers or their victims. Intense nightmares of his own abduction and imprisonment as a small boy still plague him thirty-some years later, and claustrophobia prevents him from attempting to travel.

So when Bryan’s boss asks him to fly to Reykjavik to teach his corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar, he initially refuses. But a CEO has specifically requested Bryan—or no one else. Finally Bryan relents…

For decades he’s treaded gingerly around his deepest terrors. Now, on this trip, Bryan’s taken hostage again and must face his fears full-on. Will he realize that in this battle of will and nerve, he is his own greatest enemy? Or has this fight already been lost years ago?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101514924
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/03/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	730,924
File size:	273 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Aaron Elkins is the author of the Edgar Award-winning Gideon Oliver mysteries.

Editorial Reviews

Bryan Bennett, who was kidnapped and held for two months as a five-year-old, has largely overcome that trauma to become a successful hostage negotiator for a Seattle security company in this taut stand-alone from Edgar-winner Elkins (Turncoat). When Bryan's boss, Wally North, asks him to present a "corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar" to GlobalSeas, an Icelandic fisheries company, Bryan, who tries to avoid confined spaces, convinces himself that medication will enable him to endure the plane flight. Even Bryan's discovery that Wally neglected to tell him that GlobalSeas' CEO survived an abduction attempt doesn't deter Bryan and actually motivates him to seek professional help for his crippling panic attacks. Once Bryan and his long-suffering wife, who's looking forward to a vacation, arrive in Iceland, he's plunged into a dangerous situation that puts his sanity and life at risk. While a final twist will strike many readers as a cheat, Elkins excels at maintaining tension throughout and in making his hero's difficulties accessible. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A mind-bending, heart-pounding read…I’m in awe.” —Ridley Pearson, New York Times Bestselling Author

“An evocative portrayal of the inner workings of a mind tormented by terror.”— Jonathan Kellerman, New York Times Bestselling Author

“One whopper of a surprise ending…this may well be [Elkins’] best book.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

The creator of forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver (Skull Duggery,2009, etc.) plunges the egghead designer of a hostage-negotiation protocol into a harrowing abduction in far-off Iceland.

When he was five years old, Bryan Bennett was kidnapped and held for 58 days while his parents, working in Turkey, sweated to come up with the ransom. Small wonder that as an adult, he's become such an expert on negotiating with kidnappers that he's written the book for the Odysseus Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Security. Now his new boss, Wally North, wants him to fly to Reykjavik to lead a self-protection seminar for the executives of GlobalSeas Fisheries. Bryan's own phobias—he doesn't lead seminars, hates airline travel and still suffers from frequent panic attacks—threaten to make the trip a nightmare even before GlobalSeas CEO Baldur Baldursson, who's already survived one botched abduction attempt, is snatched again, this time in the company of Bryan's wife Lori. The kidnappers, who include the three clueless left-wing ideologues of Project Save the Earth and George Henry Camano, the ice-cold freelancer they've hired to coordinate the snatch, are no more happy to have grabbed Lori than Bryan is to have lost her. Their face-off pits the expert negotiator against the expert kidnapper and inevitably leads to Bryan's exchanging himself for his wife. It's only then that his ordeal truly begins.

A well-calculated change of pace for normally laid-back Elkins, with mounting thrills, a heavy emphasis on self-therapy and a nice surprise at the end.

Kirkus Reviews