First I will say that what you would expect from this novel is not exactly what you will get. And here I will stop with potential spoilers.

Protagonist Max Emerson is wealthy financier who works with both legal and those not-so-legal businesses. He is very wealthy, rather young and capable. Makes you hate him already - right? :) Then it will come as no surprise that due to his links to underworld his own family keeps him at arms length for fear of possible scandal.

Being haunted by his past actions (that most definitely cost people lives indirectly) Max suddenly encounters family crisis and this will lead him to the unexpected revelations about his family but also about himself.

I truly did not expect the twist at the end.

I understand many wont like the people in this novel and especially wont like that nobody gets punished for their transgression at the end. But in my opinion ending is very realistic - I especially liked how the hacker hired to harass Max Emerson and his company (regarding links to the criminal underworld) ends up.

If you seek action, gunfights and assassins lurking around (aka usual Wignall story) you wont find it here. But you will find pretty good novel depicting relations between rather dysfunctional siblings, world of high finance (usually high also means very very low morals) and very interesting twist at the end.

Recommended to all thriller fans. ( )

First, let me say, this is not a "thriller." Rather, it is a rich, sophisticated, and accomplished character study of Max, a wealthy and connected international financier of ambiguous character who realizes he is not who he wants to be. Yet, he is stymied to change that because he does not know what it is that he really wants to be.

In unwinding heretofore unknown family secrets in an attempt to discover who his parents, suspiciously killed together in a motor accident, were, he is forced to confront sources of sibling hostility and the pursuit of his own mental constructs that have effectively estranged him from family.

What ultimately makes this book compelling is that it is really an exploration of the morality of money and the self deceptions we endure in order to lend meaning to events in a desire to corroborate our own views. And what ultimately makes the novel great fiction is that Max is entirely and naturally human -- a man of ability, charm, and a special honesty. Readers may find Max's affixed moral compass unique and perhaps beyond magnetic. . .well, read and decide for yourself if it points true north.

If you like le Carre's George Smiley, you will be just as absorbed into the mind and exterior world of Max. Kevin Wignall has constructed a modern hero/anti-hero for our times and as an added bonus, set him down on the beautiful shores of Lake Maggiore, Italy. ( )

Max Emerson appears to have it all, a financial whizz-kid whose success allows him the finer things in life. However Max has made his money by controlling investments for some of the shadier characters in society, and he is haunted by a deal made several years ago in which a corrupt Senator was paid off and a man died. When Max's parents are killed in a car crash he has to return to the Swiss family home and his estranged siblings but Max does not believe that the crash was an accident and revelations about his mother's past seem to back that up. Meanwhile the FBI are looking into the past deal.

To say that this is a thriller is to completely undersell the book. Wignall has a way of writing prose which lulls the reader into a sense of enjoyment and, even when the topic matter is spying or organised crime, it seems natural and not forced. There are none of the cliches of the genre, this is a story about a successful man who is lacking emotional balance rather than a story about international finance and dubious business. It is because of the slightly off-beat approach that I really loved this book. ( )