Trade Secret
Most of the lawyers Nason Nichols, P.I., knew had their offices in the basement of a courthouse; for Holtree's client, he quickly recalculated his daily rate. Zoltec Industries was the world's leading producer of high-powered microprocessor computer chips. A former employee, Dr. Bruce Platt, had stolen vital technological secrets which if sold to foreign competitors would mean disaster for Zoltec and for its founder, Armand Zoller. But the formidable Zoller has devised an ingenious scheme to safeguard his company and send the competition down the microchip path; Nichols, with the help of Zoltec's top scientist, Dr. Rachel Ornstein, is to provide the necessary discretion, ingenuity, and brawn. Rachel, Platt's spurned lover, is the kind of woman who deserves long looks and deeper thoughts: welcome distractions for Nichols, who has done without distaff companionship since his wife's departure on a self-empowered journey in search of her core. Traveling across New England's fall countryside in search of Platt, the Harvard-dropout sleuth and the sensuous physicist take a wrong turn into murder when Nichols discovers a shotgunned corpse in his quarry's New Hampshire cottage. Nichols, a suspect by default, needs answers fast. His Vietnam buddy and high-tech stock expert, Bucky Hanrahan, offers hot tips, brotherly concern, bawdy flights of prose and martini-sodden musings on the Celtic twilight; Zachariah Truscott, a suave blond Brahmin and Zoltec's B-school financial guru, pleads his fiscal case at the Union Boat Club; Butch Tenaki, Nichols's Harvard pal, provides the State Department's take on thugs hired by foreign companies; Dr. Winston Quarles, a disgruntled Zoltec scientist, reveals the damaging liaison he's formed and the painful reasons for it. In a whirlpool of greed and deception, misguided passion and a lethal interest in the status quo, Trade Secrets barrels towards its ingenious and surprising conclusion.
