THE PROFESSIONALS

THE PROFESSIONALS is a fast-paced thriller about four best friends and recent university graduates who turn to a life as professional kidnappers when the job market fails them.

For the last two years and counting, Arthur Pender and his gang have criss-crossed the United States, making scores and moving on with nobody the wiser. The team believes they've developed the perfect strategy: work quick, work cheap, and never stop moving. Everything's working perfectly until they kidnap the wrong man. When Minnesota state trooper Kirk Stevens stumbles onto Pender's transcontinental crime spree, he enlists the aid of beautiful FBI agent Carla Windermere in tracking down the team. Complicating matters is the presence of Alessandro D'Antonio, a ruthless Mafia hit man out for revenge after a kidnapping in Detroit goes terribly wrong. Over the course of the novel, Pender, Stevens, Windermere and D'Antonio match wits in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse that will take them from the American Midwest to Seattle and Miami and back again, their pursuit ultimately culminating in a series of explosive - and deadly - confrontations that will force each player to recognize that the true professionals, cop or criminal, are those who are willing to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of success.

Laukkanen grew up in Canada, and graduated from the University of British Columbia. For three years after graduation, he worked as a reporter for the web-site www.pokerlistings.com, covering the most prestigious poker tournaments all over the world, including Monaco, Macau, Australia, and Uruguay. He has since retired from poker reporting to write full time. THE PROFESSIONALS is his first novel.