There’s lots of advance praise for thriller author Joseph Finder’s new novel, The Oligarch’s Daughter, and it moves swiftly from its settings in Manhattan, small-town New Hampshire, the White Mountains, rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere. There’s even a short interlude in Moscow. Essentially, it’s a story about running for your life.
As it begins, boat builder Grant Anderson agrees to take a sick friend’s client out for some ocean fishing. Once alone on the water, the client reveals he knows Grant is a New Yorker named Paul Brightman, living in hiding for the past six years. He’s been sent to kill Paul, but it’s the assassin who ends up dying.
They’ve found him!
His fake identity revealed, Paul immediately goes on the run, hiking through the mountainous wilderness of New Hampshire. Killing that one pursuer will never be enough. More will, and do, come.
How does it happen that a person, even one living with a false identity, would be so prepared to abandon his life at a moment’s notice? Six years earlier, Paul Brightman was an up-and-coming Wall Street financial wizard when he met Tatyana Belkin at a cocktail party. She’s a photographer and lives in a tiny East Village apartment. They dated, they fell in love. Only when they decide to marry does she let him meet her father. Arkady Galkin is a Russian oligarch who owns a palatial townhouse (actually, two townhouses combined) on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He’s a billionaire. And, in the way of the super-rich, he’s surrounded by security people who treat Tatyana’s boyfriends with deep suspicion.
Although Paul is warned about the dangers of becoming involved with the oligarch, he doesn’t do the sensible thing. He marries Tatyana. Worse, he goes to work in Galkin’s investment company, insisting on doing the research into proposed stock purchases in the thorough way he knows best. You won’t be surprised that some of these purchases are being proposed for ‘unconventional’ reasons, and his suspicions are gradually aroused. Never more so than when the FBI approaches him about spying on Galkin’s company, looking for ties to the Kremlin.
At first he refuses, but when his unease is confirmed by the mutterings of his fellow analysts and when one of them dies under suspicious circumstances, Paul reaches out to his FBI contact. Security at Galkin’s company is tight, and gaining access to papers and computer files is certain to be discovered. There are some scary moments as Paul investigates, but when another colleague dies, he knows he has to flee – leaving Manhattan, Arkady Galkin, Tatyana and his career behind, eventually becoming boat builder Grant Anderson.
The chapters involving his and the Galkin family’s relationships just didn’t ring true to me. He falls in love too fast. He decides to marry someone he barely knows with whom he has little in common. There is no real relationship there. The Galkins’ display of wealth may be true-to-life, I don’t know, but it felt like someone’s idea about how super-wealthy people would behave, or what they would have. For example, Arkady’s 164-meter-long yacht would be the second-longest in the world, and probably the longest in its era. Though it’s full of biometric security devices, cameras, and the like, he spies there too.
If the FBI work is risky for someone under constant surveillance, when Paul travels with Galkin to Moscow surveillance is just as tight and not friendly. Yet, he decides to interview the elderly woman whom he believes fixed Arkady up with the Kremlin decades earlier. That too seemed unrealistic. Much too risky, even for Paul.
I enjoyed the chapters involving his trek through the mountains. He was well prepared for that because, luckily, his father back in Washington State was a survivalist and taught him how to camp, cover his tracks and hide out in the woods. His father even makes a timely and unexpected appearance. But the woods aren’t safe either. Not only are Galkin’s goons after him, now it appears the FBI and CIA are too, and an implausible succession of betrayals ensues.
If what you’re looking for is a high-stakes adventure, with straightforward writing, this book certainly offers that. You get to know Paul himself fairly well, but the rest of the characters are a little thin. Author Joseph Finder is good on the problem of trying to ‘disappear’ in the internet age, how to avoid security traps and the like, which I enjoyed reading about. If it weren’t January, I’d say this is a good beach read.
Also try Bay of Thieves by Megan Davis or The Last Days of Johnny Nunn by Nick Triplow.
Head of Zeus
Print/Kindle
£5.03
CFL Rating: 3 Stars
