Walls of Silence
A Novel
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The hero of Philip Jolowicz's astonishing debut thriller is an everyman who believes he has everything but soon finds himself inexplicably plunged into a world of unspeakable moral corruption. A world where, for its victims, death is most likely the preferred option. In his office off Wall Street, Fin Border surveys his future with confidence. He's a young attorney bound for partnership in a British law firm set to merge with its immensely powerful American cousin in Rockefeller Center. His client list is the envy of his colleagues, his already burgeoning bank account is about to swell. And he truly believes he has consigned to the past the shame and disillusion surrounding the death of his once-revered father, a founding partner of the firm.
But an invitation from JJ Carlson, Fin's client and best friend and one of Wall Street's most mercurial investment bankers, proves just how fragile Fin's existence really is. After five shocking minutes, Fin is staring at a scene of carnage on the FDR Drive, as well as the wreckage of his own life and career in New York.
Fin's clients are abruptly torn from him, his money is siphoned and replaced by crippling debt, and the prospect of crushing litigation and a criminal record loom large. Fin's friendships and connections count for nothing. Only Carol Amen, senior in-house counsel with Jefferson Trust -- JJ's former employer -- seems to offer any chance of survival, professional or emotional. She has a deal for him, a salve for his pride and something that will get him out of the United States for a while. But Fin has been booked on a flight to the last place on earth he wants to visit.
A crackling, character-driven business thriller, masterfully spun by a true-life legal titan of global finance, Walls of Silence follows a fast-rising lawyer through a treacherous international maze of preying power brokers and deadly conspiracies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This engrossing, labyrinthine debut legal thriller by a British attorney with a background in international finance is at times annoyingly murky, but the tension level is high. Five years an expatriate in the New York offices of a London-based law firm, Fin Border the son of an original partner who died in Bombay under highly questionable circumstances is caught in a web of intrigue when one of his clients, an influential banker, commits suicide by driving a million-dollar custom automobile over a parapet and plummeting down to Manhattan's FDR Drive. To avoid scandal, Fin is taken off the momentous merger of his firm with a top competitor and sent to Bombay, accompanied by his girlfriend the legal counsel for another important banking client to handle the acquisition of a nondescript Indian corporation. After an old crony of his father tries to warn him that he may be in jeopardy, Fin finds this kindly ally brutally murdered, the only clues a slim book of Rudyard Kipling stories and a letter to a young paralegal that has scores of numbers scrawled across its back. In Bombay, Fin is drugged, taken to a brothel and then to the site of his father's enigmatic death, where an attempt is made to assassinate him; his mother pays the ultimate price. International white slavery and high finance lead back to old school ties at Oxford and the schemes of a secret cabal of four undergraduates. Although the disjointed narrative may frustrate the reader trying to sort out the myriad Gordian plot twists, the action culminates in a heart-stopping finale. Readers who have the patience to deal with a complex plot will find that this has all the diabolic undercurrents of a first-class chiller. 5-city author tour.
