Binding: Kindle Edition
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Format: Kindle Book
Label: Dell
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Dell
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 768
Publication Date: 1999-05-17
Publisher: Dell
Release Date: 1999-05-17
Studio: Dell

In his explosive debut thriller, Christopher Reich tells the harrowing story of a young man willing to risk everything--his career, his integrity, and even his life--to hunt down his father's killer. Set in the secret, labyrinthine world of Swiss banking, Numbered Account, with its detail and intelligence, could have been written only by an insider--the author himself worked at a major Swiss bank for three years.

Former U.S. marine and Harvard Business School graduate Nicholas Neumann seems to have it all: a dream job, a beautiful fiance, a future bright with promise. But beneath the dazzling veneer of this golden boy is a man haunted by the brutal killing of his father seventeen years before. And when new evidence implicates the venerable United Swiss Bank in the crime, Nick finds himself willing to do whatever it takes to uncover the truth.

Leaving behind everything he holds dear, Nick takes a job in Zurich with the United Swiss Bank, and is soon plunged into a world where everything--loyalty, power, even life and death--can be bought and sold for the right price. As the secrets of the venerable bank are laid bare, suddenly Nick knows far too much--about the offer he never should have accepted, about the money he never should have handled, about the woman he never should have loved. And as the darkness gathers around him, Nick is faced with a shattering truth: To catch the criminal who murdered his father, he must become a criminal himself.

A work of searing intelligence and sheer storytelling genius, Numbered Account is one of those rare thrillers that not only make you sweat, but make you think.
Through the eyes of Christopher Reich, dive into the corrupt world of international high finance. In his debut novel, Reich offers a realistic and gritty "day-in-the-life" perspective on working in the world's financial mecca. For Nick Neumann, an ex-marine turned Harvard MBA with a gorgeous fiancée and an elite position at Morgan Stanley, life is good--until his mother's untimely death opens old wounds and rehashes questions regarding his father's unsolved murder. Nick wants the truth and is willing to sacrifice his career, love, and future for a crack at untangling the mystery surrounding his father's death. To do this, he takes a job at the prestigious United Swiss Bank, the venerable financial cornerstone of Geneva and his father's former employer. Before he can begin his investigation, however, disturbing events come into play: One portfolio manager is dead, another had a "nervous breakdown," and his training manager is jumping ship to cast accounts with their staunch enemy. All of the managers have one thing in common: they each oversaw a multimillion-dollar numbered account owned by the mysterious Pasha. If that isn't enough, the DEA steps in and orders Nick to serve up Pasha on a silver platter. Being the embodiment of American ideals, Nick takes matters into his own hands and is caught in a ruthless conspiracy that stretches around the world and into his personal life. Peppered with murder, revenge, and first-rate espionage, Numbered Account is a thinking person's thriller, a refreshing break from the old standbys.

Customer Rating:
Summary: I liked it
Comment: the book is effectively a page-turner - I read it in 3 days. I only hope it's really fictional, for it paints Swiss bankers in a very black light!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Some cool reading for the summer
Comment: A fun summer read. Maybe the best thing about it for summer is that it's in a cold, cold country and it's snowing for most of the novel. It'll help you beat the heat.

Don't expect to feel like you slept in a Holiday Inn Express after reading this, it's just a fast-paced, semi-predictable thriller set in the beautiful mountains of Switzerland. Swiss Banking has probably changed since this book was written, it's practically pre-digital age, but I think it's untechnical enough to still be interesting.

Enjoy!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Intelligent interesting thriller
Comment: This book started out a little tough, diving right into the world of high finance and a character with whom I was not familiar. However, after the first five chapters, the book begins to pick up and does not let up until the last page. Very intersting, and though I was not interested or educated on the world of high finance, Christopher Reich provides enough insight to make the entire story flow seamlessly. This is definitely a must read for anyone who enjoys a good thriller.

Timothy Lassiter, author of Three Degrees of Separation and The Devil You Know

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An entertaining, if somewhat stereotyped thriller
Comment: Neumann, the protagonist, heads to Zurich to join United Swiss Bank, the bank where his father worked before his untimely murder. Neumann hopes to unravel the mystery of that murder, as well as possibly gain a career as a banker (though this goal is unclear or much secondary to his primary obsession for revenge and knowledge.)

There he meets the lovely Sylvia Schon, the indomitable bank president Kaiser, and is assigned to manage the numbered secret account belonging to "The Pasha"--a shadowy Mideastern magnate who has very precise needs for moving money, large sums of money from bank to bank every week.

Though Neumann flirts with Schon, he mainly uses her, rather confident of his charming influence over her, to gain access to bank records concerning his dad. Then he finds a correspondence with his father's agendas, bank records and a mysterious figure Alain Sufi. This Sufi is oh-so-similar to Mevlevi, who is the Pasha, and now Neumann's boss-de-facto. What Mevlevi wants, Mevlevi gets. Kaiser sees to that and Neumann must also obey. Meanwhile, a completely stereotyped DEA cop, Thorne, is trying to get information from Neumann to complete investigations into international heroine trade.

The names are fun in this book; Mevlevi, a Turk, is also the name of the major Dervish-Sufi sect, Kaiser=Emperor, Koenig (the president of the competing Adler Bank)=King and Schon is a homonym for Schoen, meaning "beautiful." Thorne=thorn in the side and of course Neumann, the new guy on the block.

The book begins brilliantly, but when Thorne the DEA agent arrives on the scene, the book descends rather quickly into mundane thriller-dom and cliche actions. I could see this as a film because as a novel, it is a bit unbelievable in terms of character development (cartoonish at times) but this could very well work for a screenplay. Still, it was a fun read if rather predictable and cliche. A good beach or plane read and possibly a good base for a screenplay and film. Recommended with these reservations.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: RIVETING AND CREDIBLE PLOT, BUT A STEEPLECHASE NOT A SPRINT
Comment: Reich is for me the undisputed master of the modern financial thriller. If you haven't read him yet, I'd suggest you start with The First Billion. If you are already familiar with his works, then Numbered Account is a worthy read with one non-trivial caveat: prose. Let me explain.

As the name suggests, it is about a young American marine drop-out moving to Switzerland in a role with an uber-secretive private bank, which he believes led to his father's shadowy death. Spicing things up a notch is the bank's biggest clandestine customer: a middle eastern pasha with towering ambitions for his holy land, ambitions that may appear bizarre to the casual reader but sound entirely plausible in this day and age.

The plot is squarely in the not-bad category. Hardly earth shattering but realistic. Twists and turns until three-quarters of the hullabaloo. Reich's knowledge of HNW banking is bang on. Perhaps even a bird's eye view into how the industry is structured and some of its insider lingo. There's the obligatory cocky patter of bankers. The bid for a hostile takeover. Romance, jealousy, revenge, the whole nine yards.

But Reich has a superlative command of his words, and therein lies my gripe with the novel. One expects a taut script in a thriller but the author so often gets caught up in his web of glorious prose that he ends up saddling its pace. For instance, in one case, while detailing some sinister plans of our Machiavellian Arab, we are subjected to about five pages--I kid you not--of excruciating landscaping that is ultimately totally irrelevant to the plot. At another juncture, just when two characters are poised to throw punches at each other after a breathless chase, out come a few pages of flashback. And so on.

In short: skim and ye shall savor. Quite a rewarding thriller otherwise.

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