Blog Tour: The Silent Oligarch by Chris Morgan Jones

Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 336
Source: TLC Book Tours


Goodreads Description:

A London intelligence agent pursues a money launderer to expose the dealings of a shadowy Russian oligarch.

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 Carr?. 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.

Thoughts:

I signed up to participate in this book blog tour, and I initially thought it sounded really good. I was going to step outside of my comfort zone and try a thriller. Unfortunately, I really couldn’t get into this one… I tried. Since it is not the type of book I normally read, I’m not going to review it. I felt lost in the money laundering aspect of it, the technicalities. I wasn’t able to visualize everything, and then I began to get frustrated. I really like the relationships involved and I was able to enjoy those scenes. Overall, this just wasn’t my type of book.