About The Silent Oligarch
• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: The Penguin Press (January 19, 2012)
A London intelligence agent pursues a money launderer to expose the dealings of a shadowy Russian oligarch.
In a world where national borders shrink to insignificance in the face of colossal wealth and corporate power, The Silent Oligarch offers a new kind of hero to combat a new kind of crime. Drawing on his decade of experience at the world’s largest corporate intelligence firm-where the wealthy buy the justice they want and the silence they need-Chris Morgan Jones leads us down into the unvarnished realities of our time in the grand tradition of John le Carré. Bearing news from a world hidden behind closed doors, The Silent Oligarch effortlessly creates a new genre in its wake.
Deep in the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources sits a nondescript bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin. He draws a nominal government salary but from his shabby office controls half the nation’s oil industry, making him one of the most wealthy and feared men in Russia. His public face is Richard Lock, a hapless money launderer bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, and greed. Lock takes the proceeds of his master’s corruption, washes them abroad, and invests them back in Russia in a secret business empire. He knows little about Malin’s true affairs, but still he knows too much.
Benjamin Webster is an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm. Years before, as an idealistic young journalist in Russia, Webster saw a colleague murdered for asking too many hard questions of powerful people; her true killers have never been found. Hired to ruin Malin, Webster comes to realize that this shadowy figure might have ordered her gruesome death, and that this case may deliver the justice he has been seeking for a decade.
As Webster peels back the layers of Malin’s shell companies and criminal networks, Lock’s colleagues begin dying mysteriously, police around the world start to investigate, and Malin begins to question his trust in his increasingly exposed frontman. Suddenly Lock is running for his life- though from Malin or Webster, the law or his own past, he couldn’t say.
Leading us into a world we can know little about, The Silent Oligarch is the brilliant overture of a major new literary talent.
About Christopher Morgan Jones
For eleven years, Christopher Morgan Jones, worked at the world’s largest business intelligence agency, Kroll International. He has advised Middle Eastern governments, Russian oligarchs, New York banks, London hedge funds, and African mining companies. THE SILENT OLIGARCH is his first novel. He lives in London.
Visit Christopher at his website.
Christopher’s Tour Stops
Tuesday, January 17th: Jen’s Book Thoughts
Thursday, January 19th: Man of La Book
Friday, January 20th: My Two Blessings
Saturday, January 28th: Mysteries and My Musings – review
Monday, January 30th: Mysteries and My Musings – about the author
Wednesday, February 1st: Life in Review
Wednesday, February 8th: Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms
Thursday, February 9th: Mrs. Q: Book Addict
Monday, February 13th: Walking With Nora
Tuesday, February 14th: The Year in Books
Wednesday, February 15th: Mary’s Cup of Tea
Thursday, February 16th: nomadreader