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The Devil's Banker [Hardcover]

Christopher Reich (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)


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Book Description

August 26, 2003
Hailed as “the John Grisham of Wall Street” by the New York Times, Christopher Reich returns to the world he knows so well--the dangerous, dazzling world of high finance and international intrigue. In this ingeniously crafted thriller, the bestselling author of Numbered Account and The First Billion introduces his most complex and engaging hero yet: forensic accountant Adam Chapel--and paints a frightening scenario where terrorism is big business and money is the ultimate weapon of war…

The explosion that shatters the smart Parisian apartment reverberates around the globe. In an instant, a suspected terrorist is dead and half a million dollars has vanished. Within days, the CIA is certain it has found a connection between the dead man and a planned terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Determined to avert another 9/11, they have assembled an elite counterterrorist task force, code name: Blood Money. Its mission: to follow the money trail. Its secret weapon: forensic accountant Adam Chapel. A man who trusts numbers more than people, Chapel has his own reasons for wanting to get the job done-- four of his colleagues were killed in the Paris blast. Now Chapel is thrust back into the line of fire when he teams up with British intelligence agent Sarah Churchill. The two are assigned to hunt down a shadowy mastermind who is moving vast sums of money from country to country, from bank to bank, leaving no tracks--as he prepares for an Armaggedon of his own devising.

As Chapel follows a disappearing money trail from Paris to Munich to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, Sarah uses her elite training to stalk the “shadow” and his elusive network. Meanwhile, their quarry is auditing their every move, laying a twisting trail of false clues and shocking surprises. With the clock ticking down, soon Chapel and Sarah have only days, hours, minutes to avert disaster as a master terrorist plots to unleash the first strike in a brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy--with an almost unimaginable goal.

Hurtling us from the winding alleys of Pakistan to the elite banking houses of Europe, The Devil’s Banker creates an adrenaline-fueled world where following the money has never been more dangerous, and evil has never been harder to unmask.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Reich (The Numbered Account; The Runner; The First Billion) returns to the stratospheric heights of international finance in this complicated novel of terrorist intrigue. Mild-mannered forensic accountant Adam Chapel revels in his first field mission, as he follows the tangled trail of a terrorist money transfer. Just as he's set to make an arrest, the suspect detonates a bomb that kills four of Chapel's fellow investigators. Injured in the blast but undeterred, Chapel teams up with Sarah Churchill, a beautiful spy of uncertain affiliation, to hunt down the bomber's secret organization. The shadowy association called the Hijira is funded in part by the elusive genius financier Marc Gabriel, who is engaged in funneling vast sums of money through legitimate and clandestine financial markets to fund Hijira's master plan to destroy the very heart of the American political establishment. Reich's numerous characters can be difficult to keep straight, as can the acronymic organizations they belong to, leading to sentences on the order of: "Run the name through the CBRS. Check for SARs and CTRs" and "OFAC called the White House. The White House called FTAT to confirm that OFAC's IEEPA request was legit...." Readers may scratch their heads in confusion as they wade through the alphabet soup, but those who persevere will receive an advanced education in the secret world of financial deviltry on the grandest of scales. Reich has a lot of fascinating financial lore to pass along, all of which goes down easily as the fast-paced plotting and relentless action speed the reader over the bumpy parts and into a satisfyingly gripping and informative read.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"This smart, fast-paced read shuttles between Wall Street finance and the Eastern paperless hawala banking system--and makes both sound surprisingly cool."
--Entertainment Weekly

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Delacorte Press; First Edition edition (August 26, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0385337272
  • ISBN-13: 978-0385337274
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,150,143 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hi Everyone,

It's great to be part of Amazon's new Author Page. Here's a short bio.

I was born November 12, 1961 in Tokyo, Japan and moved to Los Angeles four years later, in late 1965. I graduated from Harvard School (now Harvard-Westlake) in 1979, then made the move to Washington DC where I attended the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Upon graduating with a degree in international economics (a field in which I was neither particularly gifted nor interested), I worked as a stock broker for two years. One day my best client said, "Chris, you're a nice guy, but you have no idea what you're doing in this business. You might get into trouble one day. You gotta get your butt to business school." I followed his advice and headed down to Austin, Tx, to earn an MBA at UT.

After graduating from UT, I moved even farther east....all the way to Switzerland, where I joined the Union Bank of Switzerland, first in Geneva and then in Zurich. I left banking and worked first as a consultant, and then as the CEO of a small watch company in Neuchatel. The only thing I missed out on was the chocolate business! Anyway, after 7 years in Switzerland, I decided that it was high time to become an author. I'd never written a short story and I hadn't taken a single English class in college. So what? I was a demon reader and I thought for sure I could do. My wonderful wife supported the decision wholeheartedly and we moved back to Austin, where I would write my first novel, Numbered Account.

The rest, as they say, is history....Or, as I say, "history in the making!!"

 

Customer Reviews

37 Reviews
5 star:
 (12)
4 star:
 (7)
3 star:
 (10)
2 star:
 (4)
1 star:
 (4)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.5 out of 5 stars (37 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Wish rating system allowed 1/2 stars as this is 3 1/2, January 24, 2005
This review is from: The Devil's Banker (Hardcover)
Adam Chapel is a former accountant indepently wealthy from a job at a big investment firm that is recruited into a new (sub) intelligence agency against the war on Terrorism. Chapel faces ther reality behind the glamourous new career when a bomb kills members of his fellow team, on the hunt of a terrorist.
A taped message has all the acronyms (and this book is loaded with them) on edge as it threatens another attack on American soil. Enter Chapel and his enigmatic partner Sarah Churchill from M-I6. Chapels, job is to help hunt the terrorists using numbers and accounts as his tools of the trade, follow the money trail that will lead to the Hijura.

Reich does many things right in this novel. He prints out pages and pages of suspense, International intrique, and a dab of romance between his lead characters(probably preparing for a Hollywood adaptation.) The main flaws I found with this thriller was its pace. While entertaining and intriquing enough to finish, it lagged purposely in parts. There was enough suspense, but not quite enough action to rate higher on my own scale of thriller novels.

This is a well written novel, with an interesting enough premise and plot to be worth the read yet would not label it a "must-read" by any means.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievably bad, July 1, 2009
First of all: I love thrillers, and read them a lot. I liked Reich's "Rules of Deception", it was a decent read. This, however, is so bad I could go on forever, complaining about the obvious ignorance the author shows regarding geography, technical devices, and so on. But what's most annoying is the totally uninteresting and unbelievable main characters and sidekicks, who act like they are either high on something, or complete sociopaths. It seems like Reich has got the idea "Oh, there must be some personal conflicts between them!", but he has absolutely no idea how to pull it off. We are often told the characters react strongly on something said - the problem is that there is absolutely nothing to explain the reaction, when looking at what was actually said! And this goes on and on and on, intermixed with the equally unbelievable love affair between the main characters.
Poorly written on any account, this is such a waste of time and money I get mad every time I think of it.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Not good, May 30, 2010
I became aware of Christopher Reich and a fan of his when I read Rules of Deception and Rules of Vengeance, two of his newer books, so I decided to go back and read his earlier books. But I felt that this book was almost like it was written by a different person. There was a distinct lack of character development and the storyline was too busy with too many things going on at the same time without developing each line. The good thing I can say is that his writing has much improved and his two latest books are much better than his earlier ones.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
IT IS DIFFICULT TO WALK CASUALLY WITH FIVE HUNDRED thousand dollars taped to your belly. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
hundred euros, thousand euros
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Marc Gabriel, George Gabriel, Adam Chapel, United States, Holy Land Charitable Trust, Owen Glendenning, Sarah Churchill, White House, Mordecai Kahn, Royal Joailliers, Saudi Arabia, Deutsche International Bank, Abu Sayeed, Claire Charisse, Claude François, Gemeinschaft Bank of Dresden, Admiral Glendenning, Bank Montparnasse, Cité Universitaire, Santos Babtiste, Albert Daudin, Miss Churchill, Ciudad del Este, New York, Blood Money
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