Lieutenant Neal Devlin is not only the best sharpshooter in the NYPD, he's also skilled at shooting off his mouth. This time it gets him bounced off an elite SWAT team and into cop Siberia—the Traffic Division. Rather than face a slow death there, he takes a job as a security chief for Taggert Industries, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in a Manhattan skyscraper. "How hard can it be?" he wonders.

This hard:

In less than two weeks Devlin will discover that a killer is targeting the company's CEO and that the building is accessible to entry and sabotage at a hundred critical points. With the help of a feisty and tough-talking female computer specialist and an ex-con, Devlin scrambles to secure the building's severely vulnerable security system.

And in less than three weeks, after a series of mysterious "accidental" deaths of certain employees, the killer will be revealed as a world-class assassin, expert at penetrating the most sophisticated security system.

A highly sensitive deal-in-the-works prevents Devlin from going to the police, though all his instincts scream for him to do so.

With time running out and bodies piling up, Devlin finds himself trapped at the summit of the skyscraper pitting his skills against a well-armed madman with nothing left to lose.

Retribution features a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at high-tech surveillance and executive protection; an affecting portrait of a hard-edged loner, Neal Devlin, who believes he has just one more chance to get it right; and a frightening bathyscaph descent into a modern corporation where "acceptable causalities" has secured a foothold.

At once an electrifying cat-and-mouse thriller and a parable of cost/benefit accounting taken to its extreme, this is a page-turning fiction at its best.