The Silent Oligarch
Review: Chris Morgan Jones crafts a superior tale of international deceit and deception in the financial thriller The Silent Oligarch.
Richard Lock is one of the wealthiest men in Russia. Only he isn't Russian … and the wealth publicly attributed to him isn't really his. He is, in fact, a front man for one Konstantin Malin, an official in the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources, and his job is to hide foreign investments made on Malin's orders from the prying eyes of myriad government officials around the world, making them appear perfectly legitimate and legal. In other words, he's a money launderer … and he's a very good one. But when Tourna, a Greek tycoon, loses a billion dollars on one of Lock's deals, he not only wants his money back, he wants to expose Lock for who he really is, and take Malin down with him.
The Silent Oligarch is a remarkably effective novel of suspense. There is little "thriller" action to speak of, the narrative alternating between the perspectives of Richard Lock as he tries to extricate himself from the legal tangle he finds himself in, and Ben Webster, an investigator hired by Tourna to gather evidence needed to win his case, if not legally in court then in the court of public opinion. Readers who fear there may be a lot of government or legal or financial or technical details to weigh the story down should rest easy; there is enough to explain what the issues are, and why they are important to these men, but they are minimally intrusive. Rather, this is far more of a character study, of two men who come to know and respect their counterpart's strengths yet remain wary of dealing with other. The bittersweet ending comes as something of a surprise, not because of what happens or why, but because the reader has become so drawn into the lives of these characters that there's an unexpected sense of loss at how their story plays out.
Acknowledgment: Penguin Group provided an ARC of The Silent Oligarch for this review.
Review Copyright © 2012 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Location(s) referenced in The Silent Oligarch: London, Moscow, Berlin
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The Silent Oligarch by Chris Morgan Jones
Publisher: Penguin
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-59420-319-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-59420-319-0
Publication Date: January 2012
List Price: $25.95
Synopsis (from the publisher): Behind the imposing splendor of the Kremlin rises a run-down office building, home to the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources. A nondescript bureaucrat in a drab government agency, Konstanin Malin secretly controls a vast business that dominates the nation’s oil industry, making him one of the most feared and wealthy men in Russia. Over the years Malin has siphoned billions from the state and poured them into his private empire, hiding what he owns offshore.
The man who has done the hiding is Richard Lock, a diffident English lawyer whose life in Moscow is falling apart: criss-crossing the world administering his master’s affairs, he has seen his relationships with his estranged family and highly practical mistress slowly deteriorating. Lock is bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, greed, and most of all by a complex lie that neither can escape. But slowly, Lock is beginning to realize that the lie will not always hold.
Once an idealistic young journalist, Benjamin Webster now works as an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm, a mercenary spy for the rich and powerful. Webster’s cynicism and anger were born when he witnessed a colleague murdered in Russia for asking too many tough questions; now, ten years later, he may finally be able to avenge her unsolved murder. Hired by a client to ruin Malin, he discovers that this shadowy figure may have arranged his friend’s gruesome death—to hide a terrible secret buried at the heart of his criminal empire.
Soon Webster realizes that Lock is Malin’s great weakness; and when he starts to apply pressure, Lock’s fragile world begins to crack. His colleagues begin dying mysteriously, his relationship with Malin turns ominously ice-cold. The police begin asking questions, the newspapers smell blood in the water, and Webster’s investigators close in on the truth. Suddenly Lock is running for his life—though from Malin or Webster, the law or his own past, he couldn’t say.