Timely Thriller
Talk about timing. Just as Robert Harris’s cautionary tale about the perils of meddling with the financial markets was hitting the shelves, Greece was teetering on the edge of default and Swiss Bank UBS announced that unauthorised trading by one of the company’s investment bankers had led to $2.3 billion worth of losses. Harris has always had a nose for the topical. His 1999 novel, Archangel, noted that curious, self-sabotaging flaw in the Russian character which yearns for a totalitarian hard man in the Kremlin; a few years later, Vladimir Putin had completed his quiet ascent to the presidency. Harris’s wonderful 2007 thriller, The Ghost, functioned as a critique of