About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

BLACK MAPS
by Peter Spiegelman
Knopf, August 2003
283 pages
$22.95
ISBN: 1400040752


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I can't remember reading a better book based on corporate crime. Here, John March, private investigator and black sheep scion of a wealthy merchant banking firm, is hired to rescue an up-by-his-own-bootstraps investment banker, Rick Pierro, who's being blackmailed on the verge of his election to partnership. He made some deals long ago with a senior officer at a BCCI-like international bank that has now collapsed into a flood of scandal, a senior officer who has evaded capture by a phalanx of competing U.S. attorneys, FBI agents, and assorted other law enforcement types eager to make their bones on this case. Now Pierro has received faxes of the real deals he's made, together with internal memos he's never seen that may be fakes and that implicate him in money laundering for the now notorious crooks-and threats about being ready to pay up or else.

One of the delights of this book is March's investigation of the money trail and the author's explication of how such matters are resolved, including what types of experts are involved, how the databases are set up, and how connections are made. This sounds deadly dull, but it's fascinating here and, as far as I can tell, accurate.

A delight of another sort is the protagonist, his troubled background, and his current relationships, particularly with his siblings, some of whom continue to try to draw him into a sinecure in the family business, even as others of them call him a determined loser to his face, all on display at a family Thanksgiving dinner with no mince pie he'd been nagged into attending.

A third delight is the descriptive writing. Places and people and seasons come to life.

All these delights are wrapped up in a pleasure of a many-layered plot with some unexpected whips to change direction, just as I thought I'd figured everything out.

Shortcomings? Well, this fuddy-duddy is appalled by the frequent appearance of the misspelling "alright." I was reading an ARC; maybe the actual book won't be cursed by it. There was also more mention of people's clothes than interests me. It's annoying only in the first several chapters, where we're told about the cufflinks and ties various characters are wearing as they're introduced, which struck me as tedious. Spiegelman could have just said, "They were all wearing typical successful investment banker suits," in my humble opinion. But maybe you're more interested in menswear than I am.

Reviewed by Joy Matkowski, July 2003

This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]