A Calculated Risk » (Reprint)

"A dizzying, enjoyable caper...After reading this hard-to-put down thriller, you may put all your money in your mattress."
LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS When financial executive Verity Banks' latest proposal is axed by her boss, she decides to show how easy it is to break through automated security, hide money, and then show senior management where it is. Then her former mentor, financial wizard, Dr. Zooltan Tor ups the ante, and dares her to steal a billion dollars, invest it to earn thirty million in three months, then put the original billion back before anyone notices. To heighten the challenge, Tor and Verity will compete against each other, though Tor gives Verity an edge: she can use a computer for her theft, but he cannot....
A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH-CLUB ALTERNATE SELECTION

Publishers Weekly

When Verity (True) Banks was 22, she was the highest-ranking woman executive at the world's largest bank. Now, 10 years later, she is contemplating a caper that will reveal the bank's security to be inadequate, and that will surely earn her a position at the Federal Reserve. Before she can carry out her plan to break into the bank's electronic security system, her erstwhile mentor, Dr. Zoltan Tor, reappears with a challenge: Which of them can steal $1 billion, and invest it to earn $30 million in only three months? (Of course, the money will be returned, and no one will be injured.) In the process, Tor and True, with help from a crew of brilliant eccentrics, stumble on a plan by members of the Vagabond Club CEOs of major corporations-,to take over the Bank of the World, possibly sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin. Alternately sounding like a romance novel ( . . . he was tanned and golden, his coppery hair tumbling to the collar of his white silk shirt) and a text on banking (All federally chartered banks must be members of the Fed, and are required to maintain insurance deposits there. . . ), True's story proceeds haltingly, disrupted by frequent recaps and descriptions of her emotional states (my mood progressed from real fury-to intense determination-to righteous indignation-to helpless frustration-to miserable desperation-at last to hopeless exhaustion). Although Neville (The Eight) obviously knows a great deal about the world of finance, she fails to deliver the goods as a novelist. (Nov.)