Numbered Account

Numbered Account
By Christopher Reich


Product Description
A job he shouldn't have taken... A woman he shouldn't have loved... A secret he shouldn't expose...if he wants to live.

Nick Neumann had it all: a Harvard degree, a beautiful fiancée, a star-making Wall Street career. But behind the dazzling veneer of this golden boy is a man haunted by the brutal killing of his father seventeen years before.

Now chilling new evidence has implicated his father's employer, the United Swiss Bank, in the crime. Nick doesn't know how. Or why. But he has a plan to find out: move to Zurich. Work for the same bank. Follow in his father's footsteps. Look for the same secrets...and uncover something so shocking, so unexpected, justice may not be enough.

For as a circle of treachery tightens around him, as a woman with secrets of her own enters his life, Nick makes another chilling discovery. Not just about his father but about himself. And how far he's willing to go to find out what happened seventeen years before--when a man died and a conspiracy was born.


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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #91900 in Books
Published on: 1998-12-01
Released on: 1998-12-01
Number of items: 1
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
768 pages

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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Through the eyes of Christopher Reich, dive into the corrupt world of international high finance. In his debut novel, Reich offers a realistic and gritty "day-in-the-life" perspective on working in the world's financial mecca. For Nick Neumann, an ex-marine turned Harvard MBA with a gorgeous fiancée and an elite position at Morgan Stanley, life is good--until his mother's untimely death opens old wounds and rehashes questions regarding his father's unsolved murder. Nick wants the truth and is willing to sacrifice his career, love, and future for a crack at untangling the mystery surrounding his father's death. To do this, he takes a job at the prestigious United Swiss Bank, the venerable financial cornerstone of Geneva and his father's former employer. Before he can begin his investigation, however, disturbing events come into play: One portfolio manager is dead, another had a "nervous breakdown," and his training manager is jumping ship to cast accounts with their staunch enemy. All of the managers have one thing in common: they each oversaw a multimillion-dollar numbered account owned by the mysterious Pasha. If that isn't enough, the DEA steps in and orders Nick to serve up Pasha on a silver platter. Being the embodiment of American ideals, Nick takes matters into his own hands and is caught in a ruthless conspiracy that stretches around the world and into his personal life. Peppered with murder, revenge, and first-rate espionage, Numbered Account is a thinking person's thriller, a refreshing break from the old standbys.

From Library Journal
Delacorte is definitely banking on this first novel, with domestic and foreign rights already sold. Featuring the ever-intriguing Swiss banking system of numbered accounts, Reich's thriller focuses on the ethical issues of the origin and funding activities of huge "anonymous" sums. Enter ex-Marine Nicholas Neumann, who arrives at United Swiss Bank, his father's employer, to solve his murder 17 years ago when Nick was a child. Nick's quest throws him into an international web of hostile takeovers, drugs, and arms sales (including a nuclear weapon). A potential problem is the stereotypic portrayal of the primary villain as a ruthless Muslim. The novel is definitely a male fantasy, for after he conquers all, Neumann returns to the States to reclaim the fiancee who dropped him when he left for Zurich. This has almost all the elements of a best seller: murder, exotic locales, high finance, and danger, but there is surprisingly little sex; does the violence substitute? For public libraries with a large demand for thrillers.
-?Rebecca Sturm Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib, Highland Heights
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
A clever young man outsmarts himself when he goes undercover in a Swiss bank to investigate the murder of his father. Stephen Lang does his best with the suspense and fully voices the characters in a suitably melodramatic style. Yet his slightly adenoidal voice may irritate some sensitive listeners. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


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Customer Reviews
Intelligent interesting thriller
This book started out a little tough, diving right into the world of high finance and a character with whom I was not familiar. However, after the first five chapters, the book begins to pick up and does not let up until the last page. Very intersting, and though I was not interested or educated on the world of high finance, Christopher Reich provides enough insight to make the entire story flow seamlessly. This is definitely a must read for anyone who enjoys a good thriller.

Timothy Lassiter, author of Three Degrees of Separation and The Devil You Know

An entertaining, if somewhat stereotyped thriller
Neumann, the protagonist, heads to Zurich to join United Swiss Bank, the bank where his father worked before his untimely murder. Neumann hopes to unravel the mystery of that murder, as well as possibly gain a career as a banker (though this goal is unclear or much secondary to his primary obsession for revenge and knowledge.)

There he meets the lovely Sylvia Schon, the indomitable bank president Kaiser, and is assigned to manage the numbered secret account belonging to "The Pasha"--a shadowy Mideastern magnate who has very precise needs for moving money, large sums of money from bank to bank every week.

Though Neumann flirts with Schon, he mainly uses her, rather confident of his charming influence over her, to gain access to bank records concerning his dad. Then he finds a correspondence with his father's agendas, bank records and a mysterious figure Alain Sufi. This Sufi is oh-so-similar to Mevlevi, who is the Pasha, and now Neumann's boss-de-facto. What Mevlevi wants, Mevlevi gets. Kaiser sees to that and Neumann must also obey. Meanwhile, a completely stereotyped DEA cop, Thorne, is trying to get information from Neumann to complete investigations into international heroine trade.

The names are fun in this book; Mevlevi, a Turk, is also the name of the major Dervish-Sufi sect, Kaiser=Emperor, Koenig (the president of the competing Adler Bank)=King and Schon is a homonym for Schoen, meaning "beautiful." Thorne=thorn in the side and of course Neumann, the new guy on the block.

The book begins brilliantly, but when Thorne the DEA agent arrives on the scene, the book descends rather quickly into mundane thriller-dom and cliche actions. I could see this as a film because as a novel, it is a bit unbelievable in terms of character development (cartoonish at times) but this could very well work for a screenplay. Still, it was a fun read if rather predictable and cliche. A good beach or plane read and possibly a good base for a screenplay and film. Recommended with these reservations.

RIVETING AND CREDIBLE PLOT, BUT A STEEPLECHASE NOT A SPRINT
Reich is for me the undisputed master of the modern financial thriller. If you haven't read him yet, I'd suggest you start with The First Billion. If you are already familiar with his works, then Numbered Account is a worthy read with one non-trivial caveat: prose. Let me explain.

As the name suggests, it is about a young American marine drop-out moving to Switzerland in a role with an uber-secretive private bank, which he believes led to his father's shadowy death. Spicing things up a notch is the bank's biggest clandestine customer: a middle eastern pasha with towering ambitions for his holy land, ambitions that may appear bizarre to the casual reader but sound entirely plausible in this day and age.

The plot is squarely in the not-bad category. Hardly earth shattering but realistic. Twists and turns until three-quarters of the hullabaloo. Reich's knowledge of HNW banking is bang on. Perhaps even a bird's eye view into how the industry is structured and some of its insider lingo. There's the obligatory cocky patter of bankers. The bid for a hostile takeover. Romance, jealousy, revenge, the whole nine yards.

But Reich has a superlative command of his words, and therein lies my gripe with the novel. One expects a taut script in a thriller but the author so often gets caught up in his web of glorious prose that he ends up saddling its pace. For instance, in one case, while detailing some sinister plans of our Machiavellian Arab, we are subjected to about five pages--I kid you not--of excruciating landscaping that is ultimately totally irrelevant to the plot. At another juncture, just when two characters are poised to throw punches at each other after a breathless chase, out come a few pages of flashback. And so on.

In short: skim and ye shall savor. Quite a rewarding thriller otherwise.