Numbered Account » (Reprint)

Christopher Reich was born in Tokyo in 1961. A graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Texas at Austin, he worked in Switzerland before returning to the United States to pursue a career as a novelist. The bestselling author of four other acclaimed novels, Numbered Account, The Runner, The First Billion, and The Devil’s Banker, he lives in California with his wife and children.

A job he shouldn't have taken... A woman he shouldn't have loved... A secret he shouldn't expose...if he wants to live.

Nick Neumann had it all: a Harvard degree, a beautiful fiancée, a star-making Wall Street career. But behind the dazzling veneer of this golden boy is a man haunted by the brutal killing of his father seventeen years before.

Now chilling new evidence has implicated his father's employer, the United Swiss Bank, in the crime. Nick doesn't know how. Or why. But he has a plan to find out: move to Zurich. Work for the same bank. Follow in his father's footsteps. Look for the same secrets...and uncover something so shocking, so unexpected, justice may not be enough.

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 co...

Library Journal

Featuring the ever-intriguing Swiss banking system of numbered accounts, Reich's thriller focuses on the ethical issues of the origin and funding activities of huge "anonymous" sums. Enter ex-Marine Nicholas Neumann, who arrives at United Swiss Bank, his father's employer, to solve his murder 17 years ago when Nick was a child. Nick's quest throws him into an international web of hostile takeovers, drugs, and arms sales (including a nuclear weapon). The novel is definitely a male fantasy, for after he conquers all, Neumann returns to the States to reclaim the fiance who dropped him when he left for Zurich. This has almost all the elements of a bestseller: murder, exotic locales, high finance, and danger, but there is surprisingly little sex; does the violence substitute? -- Rebecca Sturm Kelm, Northern Kentucky University. Library, Highland Heights