Paranoia

Joseph Finder

Joseph Finder was born in Chicago in 1958 and spent much of his early childhood in Afghanistan and the Philippines. He later moved with his family to Bellingham, Washington and then to Albany, New York where he attended high school.

As an undergraduate at Yale, Joe majored in Russian studies, sang with the school's legendary a capella group, the Whiffenpoofs, and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1984, he received a master's degree from the Harvard Russian Research Center and later taught on the Harvard faculty.

At the age of twenty-four, Joe published Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America's Most Powerful Businessmen, a controversial expose about multi-millionaire Dr. Armand Hammer's ties to Soviet intelligence. Though Hammer threatened a libel suit, the fall of the Soviet Union opened archives that verified the truth of Joe's account.

Joe turned to fiction in the late 1980s, discovering in the process that his secret sources (Joe is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers) revealed classified information more willingly to a novelist than they did to him as a journalist. His first novel, 1991's The Moscow Club, imagined a KGB coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Some considered the premise far-fetched - until six months after the book's publication, when the coup actually happened. The Moscow Club was eventually published in thirty foreign countries, became a bestseller throughout Europe, and established Joe as an authority on espionage and political intrigue.

Joe's second novel, Extraordinary Powers (1994), about the discovery of a Soviet mole in the highest ranks of the CIA, debuted just days before the unmasking of CIA mole Aldrich Ames. In 1996, William Morrow published The Zero Hour, which featured a female FBI agent tracking a terrorist in Manhattan. The Zero Hour was the first novel ever written with the official cooperation of both the CIA and the FBI. Joe's fourth novel, High Crimes, was a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The film adaptation of High Crimes, released in 2002, starred Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman.

2004 saw the publication of Paranoia, a thriller set in the corporate world that made the New York Times bestseller list in both hardcover and paperback, and is currently in development at Paramount. Joe's most recent novel, Company Man (2005), was an immediate New York Times bestseller, and will be available in paperback in March 2006. He is currently at work on his next book, Killer Instinct, which is scheduled for a Spring 2006 release.

Joe continues to write extensively on espionage and international affairs for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. His new book, Killer Instinct, was published by St. Martin's Press on May 16, 2006.