«The Banker's Wife», an excellent thriller

Tuesday's books - Lauriane Pipoz

Marina Tourneau is a journalist. On vacation in France with her fiancé, she finds it hard to relax and accepts an assignment from her superior. When he turns up dead, she realizes they're onto something big. For her part, American Annabel has been living in Geneva for two years with her husband, a private banker. She is devastated to learn of his death in a plane crash. And even more so when she discovers what his job really consisted of.

These two women will soon find themselves immersed in a world they don’t know well enough: private banking. This is not the case for Cristina Alger, who comes from a prominent family in finance and is a former financial analyst for the private bank Goldman Sachs. The book plunges us right into the world of tax fraud, alongside terrorists, executives, and businesspeople—but also ordinary people with a certain amount of money who are eager to evade taxes.

Sugar, spices, and lots of good things

In The banker's wife, all the ingredients are there for a great thriller: an isolated, lost, and endangered main character; a host of suspicious characters; a nosy reporter; and an episodic narrative that keeps us from putting the book down («I’m just finishing this chapter.» «Actually, I’m just starting the next one.»). Special mention for daring to make his grief-stricken wife read a clichéd domestic thriller.

«The book, a domestic thriller, featured a wife who disappeared on her way home from work. The kind of story she had read a million times—a novel with the word ‘‘daughter’’ »in the title, a slightly twisted narrator, and characters whose names she always forgot."

And yet, she knows how to stand out. First of all, through her accessible explanation of the world of finance. After reading her impressive biography, you realize she surely knows what she’s talking about. But that doesn’t mean she’s hard to follow: the plot of her story is clearly inspired by the Panama Papers scandal (2016), but it’s almost entirely in the service of her fiction. So don’t be afraid of encountering complicated explanations filled with too many numbers and too many financial terms in English.

A reflection of our society

But this book, aimed at a general audience, also addresses certain contemporary issues. First of all, it is not the wife who disappears, but the husband. The author portrays two strong, independent women who find themselves in situations where they have no choice but to rely on themselves. While we welcome this aspect, we do take slight issue with the cliché in this sentence, which likely reflects another cliché: it would be even better if, in the near future, we could successfully place female and male characters—both imbued with common sense—side by side in the spotlight, and for that to seem normal to everyone. Looking at the book’s ending, however, one might venture to wonder if this isn’t the intended effect—and note that Alger is definitely not afraid of clichés.

Finally, the protagonists are pursued by all-powerful individuals who can control everything: they see everything, hear everything, and possess everything. If the extent of the powers of these «villains,» straight out of Big Brother It may seem a little far-fetched, but we can still point out that a documentary titled «Goldman Sachs: The Bank That Runs the World» was released in 2012. So maybe we’re wrong to see clichés everywhere. And no doubt this thriller is simply an excellent thriller.

Cristina Alger
The banker's wife
Translated by Nathalie Cunnington
Albin Michel
2019
416 pages

Write to the author: lauriane.pipoz@leregardlibre.com