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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. "
The most amusing scenes are those in which women act and are in danger.Zoe is a phenomenon in a car chase through the mountains of Vaucluse, navigating hairpin bend in a battered Peugeot. fleeing to escape an assassin Annabel, with the enemy knocking on her door, finds a Swiss army knife just in time to discover a clue that her husband has hidden in the bedroom.
Between the two, there is a lot of dialogue explaining offshore bank accounts, legalities, sanctions Readers can enjoy refreshments, but there is something awkward
Algiers shines the most when it describes places – surely there is a bit of Annabel, the painter, in it.With her, we visit "the big faces in red bricks, the black wooden shutters, the hatched windows and the pointed roofs" of a street houses Belgravia in London and we are rewarded with some sense of her own reaction to this environment as she enters one of the houses to visit a parent of Assad. "It struck Annabel as remarkable that a man who could be at least tangentially responsible for the massive destruction of entire cities in Syria can live in such a peaceful place."
As a journalist of the company, I particularly enjoyed Marina's description. the holidays, especially the excitement of being in a room with interesting people, and how one can feel like "a big game hunt" – as well as his triumph as a reporter of crimes financial. It's fun to imagine your own life as a thriller.
But the most intriguing, fresh narrative is that of the three women. Guests in the world of wealth, they flirt with all its pitfalls, even if they are aware of the sacrifices they make to be part of it. (Will they leave their jobs to support their husbands' careers?) That their choice of accepting or rejecting easy life is the real thriller here.
The wives of the real life bankers who are their peers in Algiers, 38, will probably agree. Some of them have already chosen the novel for their book club at the Southampton Arts Center next month. – Bloomberg
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