Mediation,
Vella said thoughtfully, a frown on his long face. "Get someone to hold them down, hit them with a spade."
Precisely the attitude that drove me into civilian life,
I said. "You spend many hours trying to convince deranged people that no harm will come to them. Eventually, they believe you. Then your colleagues kill them."
Frank Calder's career as a police negotiator is over and his new calling in mediation is looking shaky when property tycoon Pat Carson calls him in. Carson's grand-daughter has been kidnapped and he needs a go-between. No police-because this is not the first kidnapping in the Carson family, and hard lessons have been learned. But are the two events connected? And is there a motivation other than ransom at work? A young girl's life hangs in the balance and Frank needs information. But that can be hard to come by when money gets tangled up with secrets.
