THE MONTH OF THE LEOPARD

A plucky British banker defends the free world’s financial system against a fiendish French fund manager—in a Euro-fueled thriller from a pseudonymous financial journalist.

The Baltic republics are the theater of operations for Jean-Pierre Telmont, malevolent mastermind of the Leopard Fund, the biggest hedge fund in the galaxy. There, on the edge of the capitalist universe, in the forests of Estonia, strange things are happening, beginning with the savagely brutal cooption of beautiful Tatyana Bracewell, wife of plucky Tom Bracewell, brave employee of a gigantic and, it will turn out, cowardly German bank. Mrs. Bracewell is in the clutches of savagely despicable Telmont henchman Henri Boissant, where she will stay while Telmont begins his long-planned attack on the free world’s markets with an assault on the fragile Baltic trading system. As Tom discovers not only that his wife has disappeared without a trace but that there’s not a trace of truth in the background she painted for him of her orphaned Estonian childhood, pretty Sarah Turnbull discovers that her new job with the fabulous Leopard Fund is an unpleasant thrill a minute. Her first day begins with a terrifying practical joke leading her to believe she has managed to lose a hundred million claims—but it’s just Telmont showing her a touch of the whip, ha-ha-ha. Soon after, she meets lonely Tom, and as the fiscal skies start to darken over the Baltic, and as Tom begins his search to find the Whole Truth about the wife he had loved, the two yuppies team up. Following up on clues, hacking into supposedly secure computer systems, enlisting the help of Tom’s studly banker-mates, Tom and Sarah begin to realize that they’ve stumbled onto Telmont’s megalomaniacal plan to sabotage all of modern economics. Great Perils ensue.

Tension, pitifully lacking in the first two thirds of this grand adventure for MBAs, finally arrives, but nonbankers will probably have bailed out by then.