THE DEVIL’S BANKER

Christopher Reich

Headline £17.99 hbk

Reviewed by Judith Cutler

A multi-racial task force sets out to prevent the international mayhem that would follow the assassination of a new Saudi king as he’s feted by the American President. It’s a disaffected Muslim organisation that’s under suspicion. With swift cinematic cutting, the action whisks to a variety of exotic locations all sorts of people turning out to be something they shouldn’t be, using equipment and back-up support so bristling with acronyms that you know it’s all bang up to the minute. The goodies are trying ‘to make sure that there were fewer boys left without a father’. They don’t examine, let alone sort out the injustices in the world, just preserve the status quo. And we know they’re goodies because one of the baddies wears ‘the dissolute scowl of a lifelong substance abuser’.

Unfortunately that’s about as far as characterisation gets, for the good or the bad. Sexy Sarah Churchill, for instance, the English part of the team, labours under a famous name used entirely without irony or reference to any other Churchills and an accent taught by the matron of Rodean. Her equipment is necessarily less good then her US colleagues’. The French characters are burdened by what are, I hope, the copy editor’s basic problems with the French language. To many readers these may be minor irritations, but there are enough of them to make us distrust the writer precisely when we should be suspending our disbelief if the novel as a whole is to work as well as the plot deserves.

Christopher Reich clearly knows his financial material, and the international dangers concomitant with our electronic age. I wish his characterisation and prose matched this expertise.