At first, it"s hard to like Ned Allen, the ambitious, yuppie salesman who is the protagonist of Douglas Kennedy"s new thriller. The moral dilemmas and frustrations that trouble Ned on his rise to the sophisticated heights of Manhattan seem an afterthought, perhaps tacked on in response to their total absence in his first, highly trumpeted but ultimately unsuccessful novel, The Big Picture. But Ned begins to grow on the reader. Brutally fired, then blacklisted in his own industry, he watches his Faustian bargain with a ruthless real estate tycoon unravel, and it gets easier to root for him. This entry in the recent genre of thrillers set in the world of downsized corporate America isn"t quite up to the high standards established by Donald Westlake in The Ax, but it"ll make the time go by a little faster on the red-eye back to the home office. --Jane Adams