Smart women lead gripping banking saga
When we meet Annabel Lerner, the eponymous protagonist of “The Banker’s Wife” (Putnam, she’s waiting for her husband, reading a domestic thriller – “the kind of book she’d read a million times before, a book with ‘Girl’ in the title and an unreliable narrator.”
With her third novel — a sequel of sorts to “The Darlings,” her 2012 debut — Cristina Alger offers an antidote to that sub-genre: an international thriller about two highly reliable women forced into action when the men in their lives vanish and leave them holding the bag.
The bag, in this case, is lethally sensitive data and all the rich, shadowy, violent people who’d like to keep their secrets. Though “The Banker’s Wife” is more of a clear-cut genre novel than “The Darlings,” it flows logically from that book, which dealt with the fallout of an investment scandal caused by a Bernie Madoff-like fraudster.
In this smart, incisive page-turner, Alger takes her precise understanding of the financial world and zooms in on the nebulous business of offshore banking.
Annabel’s husband, Matthew, a banker for the unscrupulous Swiss United, never makes it back to their Geneva apartment. He boards a private plane with a female client, and is proclaimed dead in a crash – an accident, officially, though no one seems to believe it.
Annabel finds herself alone in Switzerland, left to discover the stash of explosive information compiled and hidden by her husband. The only people she knows in the country are Matthew’s colleagues, who seem quite willing to kill to protect themselves.
There’s a big story here, one that could send many powerful people to prison. While Annabel grieves and adjusts to her new reality, American journalist Marina Tourneau intercepts her own piece of the dynamite: a USB from a source calling himself Mark Felt, after the famous “Deep Throat.”
“There’s a whole world offshore, Ms. Tourneau,” he tells her. “A world of dirty money, hidden away in shadow accounts, and it belongs to some very powerful and dangerous people. Imagine if you could see their bank balances. Their transactions. Their network. I’m talking about cartel kings. Terrorists. World leaders. Even people you know, people you went to school with, people who live across the street.”
Marina just wants to quit her job and marry her rich, handsome fiance, whose father happens to be running for president of the United States. But when her editor-inchief is murdered – on the same day as Matthew’s supposed accidental death — she dives deep into her mentor’s final investigation, even as it imperils her and the people she loves.
The thriller moves swiftly as the desperation and violence escalate, gliding by on clear, competent prose that never gets in the way. Its flaws are forgivable and par for the genre: some brow-raising coincidences; a fast, tidy wind-down crammed with breathless exposition.
Alger delivers an addictive dose of suspense and intrigue with a surprisingly believable plot. And all power to the bad girls, the gone girls, the difficult female characters — but it’s nice to remember that women don’t have to be unlikable to be nuanced, or to take down villainous men.
Steph Cha writes the Juniper Song mystery series.