What's the hottest financial thriller of the summer just becoming | Life

NEW YORK, July 9 – Money, it's the haircuts when you want. Money, too, is the ability to have people killed. In the new novel by Cristina Alger, The Banker & # 39; s Wife a world of riches is both a heady excesses and a rotten corruption.

Many rich people spend their money and power in this thriller stuffed with British people. secret agents, encrypted messages and murders to be solved. Fortunately, some good women are ready to take charge of them

The plot concerns the exposure of trillions of dollars hidden in offshore bank accounts. Marina Tourneau, a resourceful journalist in a magazine of the company, takes the head of the press. But not everyone wants her to go with history, including her future father-in-law, James Ellis, a billionaire developer running for president. He emits a not so veiled threat when he tells him about a leak in his Southampton mansion. A pipe burst, and he fired the guard. "With such a precious house, he should have looked at her like a hawk," he says. "Leaks can be deadly."

Algiers has two other female angels in history: Annabel Werner, the titular wife, is an artist who moved to Geneva for her husband, Matthew, who works at the string Swiss United Bank; and Zoe Durand, Matthew's assistant in a small town in southern France

Although these heroines barely cross each other (their stories take place alternately), their collective actions bring to justice a series of crimes financial: tax evasion, money laundering, financing of terrorism.

This is not exactly an escape fiction. Algiers tells its story in real events, with mentions of the Flint water crisis and the explosions of the Stade de France. Some of the banker's clients are linked to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. To inspire, Algiers studied the revelations of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, voluminous leaks of law firms that rode offshore holdings of politicians and financiers.

The comfort of Algiers with the world of finance does not just come from research. His father was CEO of mutual fund manager Fred Alger Management. After school Chapin and Harvard, she worked at Goldman Sachs, became a corporate lawyer, and then turned to writing. She married a real estate investor a few months after publishing her first book, The Darlings a story about the collapse of the Ponzi scheme of a New York hedge fund during the financial crisis from 2008. She and her husband have two children and houses in the Upper East Side and in Quogue, New York.

She portrays her class of money reliably, without ridiculing or glorifying her. Of course, there are lean socialites with "whimsical first names" that Annabel nicknamed "Bonfire Blondes" after Tom Wolfe's Van Wolf Bonfire. But there is also an attractive pair of five-inch pumps bought rue du Rhône which she can hardly walk around: "Two black satin ribbons that extend from each heel and surround her ankles and calves, giving the impression of a pointe ballerina. Annabel hoped that they seemed as expensive as they were. Matthew liked to see her in expensive things. That was the reason why he was working as hard as he, he said. He liked to show it. "