One of the current weapons in the war against terror is ...
accounting. Follow the money. It's better than blood, though
sometimes it's the same thing. Remember that Al Capone was
ultimately done in by an accountant. It is money, not love, that
makes the world go around. Love merely follows the money. Money is
sexy, but only at the bottom line. The ledgers, the debits and the
credits conjure images of desks, eyeshades and high intensity
lamps.

Christopher Reich has been writing high-finance suspense novels for
a few years now, getting his ever-growing readership accustomed to
the idea that sitting and tracing money from Point A to Point B or
moving great electronic tankers full of it across the world in a
nanosecond can actually be exciting. However, nothing that has come
before will prepare you for Reich's latest thriller, THE DEVIL'S
BANKER.

Reich takes the classic good guy vs. bad guy plotline, updates it
to reflect contemporary terrorism concerns, and lets things fly ---
and fly they do, from the first page right up to the last sentence.
In the red, white and blue corner is Adam Chapel, who walked away
from a Big 8 partnership and six-figure income to, in his mind,
make a difference serving the United States Intelligence community
as a forensic accountant. Chapel is assigned to Blood Money, an
elite counterterrorist task force assigned to thwart what appears
to be a planned terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The man planning the
attack is the mysterious Marc Gabriel, a shadowy investor and man
of many identities who is the catalyst behind the terrible and
dangerous act that is about to be unleashed.

When four of Chapel's colleagues are killed in an explosion, Chapel
teams up with Sarah Churchill, an enigmatic British agent with a
mysterious agenda of her own. Chapel follows Gabriel as he moves
vast sums of money from bank to bank, knowing that Gabriel is
planning something. Gabriel is an elusive, wily and worthy
adversary, capable of improvising wildly when things go wrong and
effectively counterattacking. Chapel and Gabriel perform a deadly
dance across cyberspace as Chapel attempts to trace Gabriel's
movements and divine his motives. But Gabriel is not acting alone;
he has a small yet elusive network assisting him, a network that
leads closer to Chapel's team than Chapel could ever reasonably
imagine. Before THE DEVIL'S BANKER is over, Chapel and those around
him will be irrevocably and brutally changed.

THE DEVIL'S BANKER is a tale that is impossible to put down, with
plausible characterization, intricate but well-explained plot
threads, and two equally suspenseful endings. Reich's ability to
explain the complicated and unfamiliar remains first-rate. With its
characters racing each other as well as the clock to a
winner-take-all destination, THE DEVIL'S BANKER may well supplant
THE DAY OF THE JACKAL as the penultimate popular spy
thriller.