The adage "follow the money" has, in recent years, become even more ubiquitous than the irritating tagline from Jerry Maguire ("show me the money"). It's become the modern means for tracking down those who live the dark side of society. In truth, monitoring the movement of money has long been a tool of law enforcement: Al Capone was busted for tax evasion, after all, not multiple murders; and many FBI agents have accounting backgrounds (or so I hear). The folks who write thrillers have been slow to catch on, but it was only a matter of time before the "CPA thriller" joined the "Lawyer thriller" - and Christopher Reich is among the first to capitalize on the possibilities. His fourth novel (the third about forensic finance), The Devil's Banker nimbly leaps onto the post-911 terrorist bandwagon. There are, however, a few missteps...
Adam Chapel was once a top investment banker pulling down over $800K per year (plus, one presumes, bonuses, stock options, and all the other perquisites of the position). He chucked all that, however, for a chance to chase bad guys by following their money trails. Whether dirty dollars come from conflict diamonds, arms sales, or opium poppies, Chapel's on 'em like white on rice.
Marc Gabriel, on the other hand, is nothing like the man he appears to be: on the surface an urbane multi-millionaire Paris investor; Gabriel is in truth a deeply-buried fundamentalist Wahabist suffused with a burning desire to avenge a "wrong" upon three governments: Saudi Arabia, France, and the USA. His plan of revenge, decades in the making, is about to come to fruition.
Standing between the wily Gabriel and his ultimate success are Chapel, his team - the Blood Money Task Force - and Sarah Churchill, a young and beautiful (but quite deadly) British spy. Gabriel, however, is no ordinary high-finance terrorist and his plan is every bit as extraordinary as he himself. As The Devil's Banker, Gabriel has bought concealed operatives deep within the fabric of the banking and securities industries, not to mention having a hidden hand on the strings of the investigation itself. Chapel and Gabriel: this pair of worthy adversaries will ply their every tool as a terrorist strives to carry out his plot against a good guy ready to sacrifice all to stop him.
Despite the "new breed" of spies - accountants instead of soldiers - the heroes don't seem to have changed much in the years since the Cold War rusted to a halt. Instead of a pasty-faced pudgy number-cruncher, Chapel is a natural athlete who completed the Ironman Triathlon (no mean feat, let me tell you). He's ruggedly handsome. He's smarter than a room full of nuclear physicists and more clever than a world-class conman. He can MacGuyver a problem even without a pocket knife or roll of duct tape. Our man Adam is none other than James Bond (or Jason Bourne) with a finance degree tacked onto his resume.
In a genre that depends on a gradual ramping up of suspense and the semi-random inclusion of plot twists - gradually revealing the identification of moles, for instance - The Devil's Banker fills the bill quite nicely. There's plenty of suspense, enough hinting that certain characters may be double-, triple- or perhaps quadruple-agents, the requisite prostitution of the beautiful woman for her country, and the rest we've come to expect. Readers will find plenty of the now-requisite depictions of Islamic fundamentalists as one French fry short of a Happy Meal; and (of course) lots of people happily prepared to die for Allah. In an unexpected plot twist, one unwilling volunteer actually decides not to die for Allah. Perhaps there's hope for Reich, yet. Unfortunately, most of the remainder of the novel is formulaic, down to the bountiful babedom of the female lead and the hero's rare packaging of intellect and athleticism in a body sculpted by Adonis. Give us a break, Chris - ugly people get laid, too, and some of them are quite smart as well. Too, his villain is possessed of such superhuman skills and instincts that it's well-nigh impossible to think he'd fail - or that he'd dream up so clunky a plan.
Where Reich might have broken new ground, he instead decided to fall back on elements of the spy novel made trite a decade or more ago by dozens of Ludlum and Fleming(-like) thrillers. Escapist fiction, yes - but nowhere near as thoughtful as LeCarre, for instance. Reich's characters are hackneyed, his plot twists sadly transparent, and his villain by now trite as well (think a shorter, clean-shaven Osama without the kidney disease). I'd hoped for something different, but with a chance to move the characters of the spy novel away from caricature, Reich did little more than change the day-to-day milieu within which his hero labors. Chapel has a New Jersey accent and lacks a Q passing him an exploding cigarette lighter or a tie tack with built-in infrared TV cameras, but he's otherwise little different from 007. Chapel coulda been a contender - but he's not