“Power Play” by Joseph Finder; St. Martin’s Press ($24.95)

Closed-door meetings in which people’s futures are sealed. Whispers in the hall. Incriminating e-mails. Paranoia around every corner. Menace beyond belief. And let’s not forget extortion, greed and secrets that could topple empires.

Joseph Finder has taken the key ingredients of political thrillers and turned them into engrossing, tense novels about business.

In Finder’s expert plots, corporate politics is as lethal and as exciting as novels in which secret agents trot the globe.

Finder’s eighth novel matches those high standards. “Power Play’s” myriad elements – corporate intrigue, a remote resort, sexism, the good old boy’s club and kidnapping – come together in a tightly coiled story. Despite the many plot threads, “Power Play” never feels overcrowded or cliched.

The top officers of an aviation corporation, including the newly appointed female CEO, are spending a long weekend at a remote, luxury lodge for a “team-building” retreat: rope trials, trust falls, the kind of ridiculous exercises overpaid executives think will make them more productive. It beats really working.

The only outsider at the retreat is Jake Landry, a junior executive who was asked to fill in by his boss at the retreat. Jake lacks the expensive education, the fine clothes and the swollen egos of the other men. Instead, he has acute intelligence, savvy skills and a secret past.

Then the lodge is invaded by a military-styled gang who seem to know much more about the company and its assets than ordinary kidnappers would.

Each of Finder’s novels has dealt with a different business. In “Power Play,” it’s the aviation industry; and while Finder includes just enough details about how airplanes are made, and how they can come apart, never once does Finder go overboard on the engineering details.

Except for a few lapses in melodrama, for the most part Finder knows how to fashion a superior thriller that shows corporate politics at its worse. “Power Play’s” credible story soars.