February 2025

THE OLIGARCH’S DAUGHTER by Joseph Finder is the kind of thriller that has you racing to read the pages.

The book opens with a young man working on a sailboat. Suddenly he realizes that the carefully devised cover that he has built for himself over the past years has been blown --- and he has been found by one of the Russians from whom he has been running. He quickly grabs his go bag with cash and survival gear, including a burner phone, and heads into the woods. He is armed with his wits and the skills he honed as a child with his father, who loved living off the grid. Readers head on the run with him as the henchmen who have been called out to catch him are close on his tail.

Turning a page, we head into his past and get to know him as Paul Brightman, a rising star on Wall Street. He made a name for himself with some clever trades that earned his company a lot of money.

Paul met a beautiful young artist from Russia named Tatyana and fell for her. She lives in a studio apartment in a rundown building downtown and spends her time working on her photography. One night, she brings him home to meet her family, and he finds himself in front of a huge building on the Upper East Side --- two townhouses put together. He walks into a party where everything is opulent and beautiful. It ends up that Tatyana’s father is a wealthy oligarch, and the life that she is living as a starving artist downtown is a kind of protest move against him. Love abounds, and the happy couple want to be married. At this point, Paul’s future father-in-law starts to strong-arm him into “joining the family business.” Well, one can guess how not so well this is going to go.

From a luxury yacht to a quick trip to Russia, the pace picks up, and Paul is enlisted to help figure out just what his father-in-law has going on and who else is in the game.

It’s brisk fun with moments of real danger and intrigue. It reminds me that a) we have not heard from Joe Finder in a while, b) he writes really wonderfully about Russia, and c) it would be a terrific streaming series. Joe said that “it has the dynastic opulence of ‘Succession’ with the tense and disorienting spy craft of ‘The Americans.’” He is spot-on! 

For more on his writing of THE OLIGARCH’S DAUGHTER, watch or listen to my interview with Joe.