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Published Jan 2012
336 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
In a world where national borders shrink to insignificance in the face of colossal wealth and corporate power, The Silent Oligarch offers a new kind of hero to combat a new kind of crime. Drawing on his decade of experience at the world's largest corporate intelligence firm - where the wealthy buy the justice they want and the silence they need - Chris Morgan Jones leads us down into the unvarnished realities of our time in the grand tradition of John le Carré. Bearing news from a world hidden behind closed doors, The Silent Oligarch effortlessly creates a new genre in its wake.
Deep in the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources sits a nondescript bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin. He draws a nominal government salary but from his shabby office controls half the nation's oil industry, making him one of the most wealthy and feared men in Russia. His public face is Richard Lock, a hapless money launderer bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, and greed. Lock takes the proceeds of his master's corruption, washes them abroad, and invests them back in Russia in a secret business empire. He knows little about Malin's true affairs, but still he knows too much.
Benjamin Webster is an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm. Years before, as an idealistic young journalist in Russia, Webster saw a colleague murdered for asking too many hard questions of powerful people; her true killers have never been found. Hired to ruin Malin, Webster comes to realize that this shadowy figure might have ordered her gruesome death, and that this case may deliver the justice he has been seeking for a decade.
As Webster peels back the layers of Malin's shell companies and criminal networks, Lock's colleagues begin dying mysteriously, police around the world start to investigate, and Malin begins to question his trust in his increasingly exposed frontman. Suddenly Lock is running for his life - though from Malin or Webster, the law or his own past, he couldn't say.
Leading us into a world we can know little about, The Silent Oligarch is the brilliant overture of a major new literary talent.
"Starred Review. Jones's smart first novel, a taut thriller about a money-laundering Russian oligarch, invites favorable comparisons to the work of John le Carré... Readers will look forward to the follow-up from the talented Jones..." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. With a mysterious, complex plot and terrific local color, this novel resonates to the pounding heartbeats of the boldly drawn main characters." - Library Journal
"Told in the third person, his narrative moves forward with an aura of malevolence to a conclusion too close to reality to be anything but believable. Minimal gun-flourishing, minimal violence, maximum moral quandary." - Kirkus Reviews
"From Chris Morgan Jones, an absolutely terrific novel. It's about international intrigue but the real deal. The Silent Oligarch is beautifully written, clean and terse, but you won't notice, because you'll be reading just as fast as you can. Very highly recommended, and you'll want more." - Alan Furst, author of Night Soldiers and Dark Star
This information about The Silent Oligarch was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christopher Morgan Jones was in Bromsgrove and grew up in Kinver in south Staffordshire. He studied English Language and Literature at St. Catherine's College, Oxford. For over a decade he worked for Kroll, the world's largest investigations company, where he specialized in Russian projects and complex disputes. He lives in London with his wife and two children. The Searcher is his third novel.
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