How to get the hostage back

The Negotiator: My Life at the Heart of the Hostage Trade
BY BEN LOPEZ
PUBLISHED BY |SPHERE, 2012
Available at Asia Books, Bt350

 “Prepare yourself. I’m coming,” it says on the back cover. The message is presumably meant to be reassuring – help is on the way – but the author is in such a rush to rack up thriller sales that it comes across as a threat.
“The Negotiator” is fairly well written with a brisk pace and thus recommended for fans of dramatic first-person accounts about cops and soldiers on the front line. As an ostensible work of non-fiction, though, it’s so thoroughly masked to protect the author’s identity that the staff at Asia Books must have wondered which shelf it belongs on. If the author’s name and everyone else’s are pseudonyms, the dialogue is made up, and the locations and even circumstances are disguised, what facts remain where credibility can anchor?
In the absence of any, you suspend disbelief and kill a few pleasant hours following Lopez from Mexico City to Karachi to London to Rio. He’s a psychologist who’s called in on kidnap-for-ransom cases (abbreviated K&R for some reason) to guide the negotiators’ moves and countermoves.
Failing utterly to come with an exciting title, the publishers go for the gusto on the book’s cover with a picture of a lethal Swat team poised to strike, but Lopez scorns machismo and doesn’t even carry a gun, let alone shoot one – and he fundamentally opposes armed assaults on kidnapers who don’t start firing first.
Much dreary common sense aside, Lopez has a fair bit of interesting information to share along the way regarding the K&R business once he dispenses with the Hollywood clich?s about hostage negotiations. And his credibility score gets a boost when some cases end in anticlimax. This is only sporadically a thriller, and in the end Bruce Willis just isn’t needed.

REVIEWED BY PAUL DORSEY, THE NATION