‘The Oligarch’s Daughter’ by Joseph Finder

Paul Brightman, a former hedge fund supervisor, has been maintaining a low profile, altering his identify to Grant Anderson and making a modest dwelling as a ship builder in a small New Hampshire city. However Paul fears it’s solely a matter of time earlier than he’s discovered.

The FBI is searching him. The CIA would love a phrase. And a rich Russian oligarch has put a value on his head. One of many oligarch’s thugs is the primary to search out him. Barely escaping along with his life, he flees into the northern New England wilderness.

5 years earlier, when Paul was engaged on Wall Avenue, he fell in love with and subsequently married a fantastic photographer named Tatanya, unaware at first that her father was a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin.

In “The Oligarch’s Daughter,” his seventeenth thriller, Joseph Finder alternates two suspenseful timelines — the current as Paul struggles to remain alive and the latest previous during which we learn the way he acquired into this repair within the first place.

Within the former, he finds himself counting on abilities he absorbed from his estranged father, a reclusive survivalist dwelling off the grid within the wilds of the Allegheny Mountains.

Within the latter, he accepts his new father-in-law’s supply of a job, will get pressured to make unlawful investments primarily based on inside data, and turns into alarmed when two of his co-workers disappear. The FBI recruits him, he will get caught spying, and he has to run for his life.

With a grasp’s diploma in Russian research and his membership within the Affiliation of Former Intelligence Officers, Finder may be very a lot at dwelling with this story of what some at the moment are calling the brand new chilly struggle. The writing is tight, the suspense is unrelenting, and the romance between Paul and Tatanya is properly dealt with as properly.

The plot is advanced, even by thriller requirements, however the creator handles it so properly that the reader is unlikely to get misplaced. Nevertheless, it has so many twists and surprises that he may need been higher served by eliminating a few them.

Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Thriller Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the creator of the Mulligan crime novels together with “The Dread Line.”