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Set in the secret, labyrinthine world of Swiss banking, 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. 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.… (more)
User reviews
The reader will find in the story Nicholas Neumann, a 28-year-old Harvard MBA graduate accepting a position with a Swiss bank for the sole purpose of trying to find out who murdered his father 17 years earlier.
Mr. Reich delivers a tightly controlled plot and pace, and the story comes together with no loose ends. Overall, I found Numbered Account a terrific novel and I highly recommend it and I look forward to reading another Christopher Reich novel. I would also like to add that Mr. Reich held his own with the likes of Clancy, Patterson and other well-known authors.
My complaints are pretty much the same as the other Reich novel I read: flat characters, rather predictable story
Now chilling new evidence has implicated his father's employer, the United
For as a circle of treachery tightens around him, as a woman with secrets of her own enters his life, Nick makes another chilling discovery. Not just about his father but about himself. And how far he's willing to go to find out what happened seventeen years before--when a man died and a conspiracy was born.
The bit about who was really taking over the USB through a rival bank was a surprise. I guess if I knew more about banking and takeovers, I would have seen it but it seemed unrelated to the ‘who killed Alexander Neumann mystery’. The person who killed his father is USB’s biggest account holder; Ali Nevlevi. A criminal from Turkey now gathering an army in Lybia or Palestine and he needs something like $800 million to buy a nuclear bomb from the now defunct Soviet Union. The only way he can make that kind of money is to take over USB through a rival bank. Up until now heroin smuggling is how he’s made his money. He brings it in and out of USB like clockwork and until now, no one has cared. In the background of this whole thing is a US CIA operation to catch Nevlevi and to stop his heroin from going out. To do that, they need to freeze his accounts and that is against everything the Swiss banking industry has stood for. Things change and he’s ultimately brought down by Nick who now knows that Ali Nevlevi is the man who murdered his father.
An intriguing insight into the workings of notoriously-secretive Swiss banks and a story of a son trying to learn about his