Graham Gage, a private detective with entrée into many high-level organizations, is hired by the head of the Federal Reserve to make sense of a number of seemingly unconnected incidents involving the FBI, international spying, murder, and the possible collapse of the American economy. While Gage moves around the United States, to France, and then to Washington, DC, his wife, who is on an archaeological dig in China, is captured by an unscrupulous army general and is used to put pressure on the U.S. government to undermine a Chinese political uprising. VERDICT Vast knowledge of international affairs, economics, politics, and psychology add depth to Gore's second novel featuring Gage (Final Target). The possibility of his plot devices coming to fruition is alarmingly real in today's world. Brad Meltzer and Vince Flynn fans will love this. [Poisoned Press is issuing a limited hardcover edition, ISBN 9781590587713. $24.95.—Ed.]
Terrorists don't need bombs to blow up a financial system, private investigator Graham Gage learns the hard way in the not-quite-so-successful follow-up toFinal Target(2010).
In the nation's financial world, the clouds are darkening, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Milton Abrams. It's a gut feeling, growing on him that the United States has become vulnerable to inimical forces sophisticated enough about money to use it like a weapon of mass destruction. Nothing definite, still unsettling things have been happening, thinks Abrams. A brilliant economist, Hani Ibrahim, has disappeared after falling from grace. An ex-FBI agent, Michael Hennessy, who also fell from grace, sort of, has been reported as a suicide. No one but Abrams frets much about the Ibrahim-Hennessy connection, but that doesn't stop the newly appointed Fed Chairman from worrying. Yes, he's aware that Hennessy had been reproaching himself bitterly for besmirching Ibrahim's reputation—plausible, perhaps, as a suicide motive—but he knows, too, that there are those in various corridors of power who'd be pleased if both men were vaporized, one way or another. Some of those corridors are in far-flung places, of course, as far-flung as China, for instance. That being the case, the question robbing Abrams of sleep is when does a suicide only resemble a suicide? Or, is the odor he's been sniffing recently the acrid smell of financial conspiracy? Enter Gage, San Francisco PI, summoned by Abrams to find out what Hennessy knew that might have made him inconvenient enough to murder. Tough, resourceful and bulldog stubborn, Gage goes to work, certain that in focusing on Hennessy he's also following the money.
Ponzi schemes and the like are so dutifully explained by Gore that they undercut narrative drive and dampen excitement. Too bad, because there are good things in this novel.