Job market sucks? Don’t try this.

Four young college graduates can’t find decent (translate: highly paid) jobs. Wait a minute, what about a kidnapping scheme to make money? It’s a simple process. Move from city to city, find and research a prospect, kidnap and collect a ransom of $60,000, release the victim unharmed, move on. Repeat.

Pender, Marie, Mouse and Sawyer are a close group of friends who share the risk and reward, and get-off on how clever they are. They enact these kidnappings for two years before a victim makes a police report. During their next crime they have to change victims at the last minute and make a terrible mistake by kidnapping  a man whose wife is ‘connected’.

Kirk Stevens of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) has a hunch the two events are related. Together with FBI agent Carla Windermere they begin to follow the trail of the foursome which puts them on the lam from the investigators and the mob.

Within The Professionals Owen Laukkanen writes a well-paced plot that ratchets up anxiety as the friend’s ties to each other begin to shatter. It’s a tense ending for this book that reads like a caper from years gone by.

~ June Lorraine