THE BILLIONAIRES' CLUB

An investigative reporter is granted the opportunity to join the elite world of billionaires in Nesbit’s crime novel.

Seth Thomas, a seasoned reporter for the Washington Post, is deflated by the decline of journalism in America and fed up with a “viciously amoral financial and digital world” that scorns the truth as unprofitable. “I was mentally exhausted constantly fighting the good fight. Who cared whether you got it right any longer? I did. But hardly anyone else in America seemed to. So what was the point?” Suddenly, he’s granted a unique point of access into the murky world of financial corruption: the chance to participate as a deep-pocketed investment mogul. Mysteriously, he is given an office, a secretary (the astonishingly talented Dotty Rungren), and an apparently unlimited bank account. Neither Seth nor Dotty have any idea who their anonymous benefactor might be (“it’s right across the street from the White House, so I figured it was for something important. I didn’t ask questions”), nor how much money available to them, though they are assured by bank representatives that their funds all but inexhaustible—a fantastical scenario artfully rendered plausible by the author. All of a sudden, Seth is a major financial player and becomes investment partners with Ivan Fedorisky, a vastly wealthy Russian entrepreneur with ties to the Russian mob. Seth decides to gamble his newfound wealth—$10 billion of it—to forge connections with the biggest, and presumably most corrupt, participants in the global financial market; the kinds of powerful people whose names showed up in the infamous Panama Papers. Finally, Seth will be faced with a terrible choice—he can pursue this extraordinary story, at the cost of considerable personal sacrifice, or he can secure the money—it doesn’t seem possible to do both.

Nesbit’s tale is a remarkable brew of mystery and political intrigue in which the protagonist explores a rarefied world of nihilistic corruption that includes the upper echelons of the American political class. Literary portrayals of this strange universe tend to be either comic-book fantasies brimming with melodramatic hyperbole or insipidly stale—the author here manages to realistically depict the shadowy corridors of wealth and power with electricity while avoiding gratuitous flights of fancy. Also, Seth is a mesmerizingly complex character, motivated, at least in part, by curiosity: “I had no desire to be a master of the universe. But some part of me wanted to test-drive it a bit. I wanted to see what the inside of that game looked like. Not because I wanted anything for myself, or because I wanted to write about it or expose it. I wanted to know.” The plot flirts with gratuitous complication bordering on convolution—any novel built around following a money trail threatens to devolve into an accounting puzzle. However, Nesbit has a strange talent for making this aspect seem playfully mysterious—rather than feeling stymied by bewilderment, the reader is more likely to feel inspired to think through the possibilities. This is an engrossing tale—thoughtful, worldly, and deeply entertaining.

A gripping novel that vividly captures the dark cosmos of financial malfeasance.