A Calculated Risk
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A female financial whiz plans the perfect bank heist in this “high-tech, high-stakes” thriller from the #1 international-bestselling author of The Eight (The Washington Post).
Verity Banks is the one of the most powerful women in finance, but she still reports to a man. Her boss not only refuses to implement her security plan to safeguard customers’ deposits, he also sabotages her shot at becoming director of security at the Federal Reserve. Outraged, Verity decides to take revenge by hitting her boss where it will hurt the most: right in his company’s balance sheet. She is about to begin her assault when she hears from the last person she ever expected to see again, Zoltan Tor.
A brilliant computer scientist who taught Verity everything she knows, Zoltan will help her if she agrees to an outlandish wager: Which of them can steal $1 billion, invest it to make $30 million in three months, and return it before anyone notices? Verity can use a computer; Zoltan will do it the old-fashioned way. To beat Zoltan at his own game, Verity will risk her fortune, her professional reputation—and her life.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Katherine Neville including rare images from her life and travels.
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.
