The Prince of Risk: A Novel Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00G9GO6KO | Format: PDF
The Prince of Risk: A Novel Description
At the crossroads of high finance and international terrorism, a New York hedge-fund manager searches for the truth behind his father's murder.
The master of the financial thriller returns.
Bobby Astor is a fearless New York hedge-fund gunslinger on the verge of making his biggest killing ever. But everything changes when his father, the venerable chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange, is murdered along with the head of the Federal Reserve in a brazen, inexplicable attack on the South Lawn of the White House. In the moments before his death, Astor's father sends Bobby a mystifying text message...a single word that Bobby soon realizes offers the only clue to the identity of his father's killer and the terrifying motivation behind the attack.
As Bobby unravels the mystery behind his father's death, he crosses paths with his ex-wife, no-nonsense Special Agent Alex Forza of the FBI, who is hot on the trail of a band of elite international terrorists intent on infiltrating New York City. All the while, Bobby must fight to hold together his increasingly risky business deal. At stake is not only the survival of his company and a colossal fortune...but also a sophisticated foreign conspiracy that threatens the entire financial system of the United States.
The Prince of Risk is Christopher Reich's most prescient, suspenseful, and entertaining thriller, a novel that anticipates the headlines of the near future and shows, once again, why The New York Times calls Reich "the John Grisham of Wall Street."
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 14 hours and 36 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: December 3, 2013
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00G9GO6KO
This is a conventional thriller about a foreign plot to destroy the US financial system, by supervillains who monitor every form of communication. Paper Gold meets The Watchmen. The writing is smooth and professional, except for the author's fondness for dangling modifiers, such as, "Beaufoy spun and shot the policeman standing behind him in the head." He does get credit for predicting correctly that if your car goes out of control near the White House, it will be riddled with bullets no matter who's in it, and the killers will be celebrated for the massacre. There's nothing new here, but many thriller fans looking for something to pass time on an airplane ride will find it acceptable. For them, this is a three-star book.
For my part, however, it was less satisfactory. I am aware that my criticisms will seem like nitpicking to most people. If you read your thrillers for broad action strokes rather than details, you should probably rely on other reviewers.
I like my thrillers tight, this one is filled with inconsistencies. Two good guys are aware that the bad guys are listening to their telephone call, and have active assassins tracking them down. They need to agree on a place to meet. It happens they both know Morse code, so one of them taps out the location. Clever, and it's plausible this might delay even supervillains with massive surveillance teams. If none of the bad guys had been Eagle scouts it might have taken them ten minutes to find a website to decode it.
A conspiracy is afoot and the only (good) people who know about it are the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. Until they die. Just before their car explodes on the White House lawn, the head of the NYSE texts the word Palantir to his estranged son, hedge fund master Bobby Astor, whose ex-wife, Alex Forza, happens to be an FBI agent. Astor has no idea what Palantir means, but he is determined to find out. The conspirators, of course, are aware of the text, knowledge that puts Astor's life in peril. In the meantime, Astor has made a bet that Chinese currency will be devalued, a gamble that places him in financial peril, to the extent of losing 400 million dollars.
Global conspiracies are plentiful and far-reaching in the word of thrillers. This one involves electronic surveillance of 57,000 influential people (mostly in government and business). Impressive but credible, given the resources of the conspiracy's backers. Is the conspiracy farfetched? In some respects, yes, but no more farfetched than is common in modern thrillers. Apart from one scene at the end, nothing about the story made me unwilling to suspend my disbelief, in part because Reich includes convincing detail about the conspiracy's design. Of course, a reader who is more knowledgeable about software or the mechanics of Wall Street financial transactions might not be as easily convinced as I was. And even to the extent that I was unconvinced, the story is so fun that I easily overcame my skepticism.
The story features -- wait for it -- a warrior monk. I have to admit that I wasn't expecting a warrior monk to show up on Wall Street, but Reich somehow makes it work.
The Prince of Risk: A Novel Preview
Link
Please Wait...