Paul Brightman, a former hedge fund manager, has been keeping a low profile, changing his name to Grant Anderson and making a modest living as a boat builder in a small New Hampshire town. But Paul fears it’s only a matter of time before he’s found.
The FBI is hunting him. The CIA would like a word. And a wealthy Russian oligarch has put a price on his head. One of the oligarch’s thugs is the first to find him. Barely escaping with his life, he flees into the northern New England wilderness.
Five years earlier, when Paul was working on Wall Street, he fell in love with and subsequently married a beautiful photographer named Tatanya, unaware at first that her father was a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin.
In “The Oligarch’s Daughter,” his 17th thriller, Joseph Finder alternates two suspenseful timelines — the present as Paul struggles to stay alive and the recent past in which we learn how he got into this fix in the first place.
In the former, he finds himself relying on skills he absorbed from his estranged father, a reclusive survivalist living off the grid in the wilds of the Allegheny Mountains.
In the latter, he accepts his new father-in-law’s offer of a job, gets pressured to make illegal investments based on inside information, and becomes alarmed when two of his co-workers disappear. The FBI recruits him, he gets caught spying, and he has to run for his life.
With a master’s degree in Russian studies and his membership in the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, Finder is very much at home with this tale of what some are now calling the new cold war. The writing is tight, the suspense is unrelenting, and the romance between Paul and Tatanya is well handled as well.
The plot is complex, even by thriller standards, but the author handles it so well that the reader is unlikely to get lost. However, it has so many twists and surprises that he might have been better served by eliminating a couple of them.
Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line.”
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