When we think of vacations, we think of the beach or the mountains, Europe or Mexico, a camper or cruise or condo. But if you’re a travel agent who specializes in helping the hunted drop off the grid, you might look to a few places that, while not off the beaten path, aren’t top destinations for the leisure class.

Think Chernobyl, Fukushima and a place that will keep radiating charm for centuries, Los Alamos and the neighboring town of Alamogordo, site of the Manhattan Project and the testing of the first atomic weapons.

At least that’s what the Korean expat Benjamin Kwon thinks when helping debtors, tax dodgers and advertising agency executives elude official scrutiny. Kwon , AKA the Buddha, does his vanish tricks in Mr. Magic, the second in the series of crime novels featuring a defrocked journalist turned PR whiz named Brinker, who made his debut last year in Mr. Mayhem.

What is it about those three sites that attracts the miscreants, misfits and marketing gurus? For Brinker and Buddha, two words: exclusion zone.

Established soon after the 1986 disaster, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is an evacuation area within a 30 km radius of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Decades after the meltdown, residents have crept back into the area.

After the Tōhoku earthquake on March 11, 2011 and the ensuing tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown made that region too hot to inhabit, yet people will always want a closer look at large-scale disaster.

Alamogordo is connected with the Trinity test, the first explosion of an atomic bomb, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the secret World War II facility that housed the Manhattan Project.

Dr. Beach isn’t naming any of those sites to his top 10 list of vacation destinations, but any place that’s off limits to the casual visitor might make a good place to hide.

That premise forms the backbone of Mr. Magic, a book that asks the question: how hard must a PR counselor work to spin a visit to a nuclear graveyard as adventure travel? For Brinker, that raises another question: how hard will his new boss at the ad agency press him to exile her rivals to these places?

Brinker will have to use all of the magic he can muster to keep himself from becoming the latest to disappear. You can read all about his struggle to give up sex, drugs and dirty tricks at Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and jeffwidmer.com, as well as bookstores everywhere.

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The Buddha helps people disappear to places like Chernobyl in MR. MAGIC