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Summary
Summary
An international thriller based on one of the bigest bank heists in history.
Billions of dollars are missing from Iraqi banks, and journalist Luca Terracini will risk everything to discover where it is. His Iraqi-American background has made it easier for him to infiltrate the darkest corners of the war, but death of his beloved Nicola in a suicide bombing has made him reckless. He has nothing left to lose.
In pursuit of the money, he meets UN representative Daniela Garner, who seems to know more about the heist than anyone else. She's a valuable asset in Baghdad where the possibility of an explosion lurks at every checkpoint. Luca's investigation proves volatile as well, and as he gets closer to the missing money, his actions begin to reverberate around the world.
In London, Richard North, a top-tier international banker and the one person who might be able to explain where the money has gone, vanishes. The manhunt for him will get Luca evicted from Iraq, separated from Daniela, and possibly end both his investigation and his life.
As usual, it's all about the money: who has it, who's lost it, and who's ultimately going to pay, as clandestine agents emerge from the shadows and powerful nations seek to control information and bury secrets, whatever the cost.
Author Notes
Michael Robotham was born in Australia in 1960. In 1979, he moved to Sydney and became a cadet journalist on an afternoon newspaper. He spent the next fourteen years working for newspapers in Australia, Europe, Africa and America. As a senior feature writer for the United Kingdom's Mail on Sunday, he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra discovered in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin's Hitler files, which had been missing for nearly fifty years.
He left journalism in 1993 to become a ghostwriter, collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, adventurers and show business personalities to write their autobiographies. He also writes novels including The Suspect, The Night Ferry, Lost, and The Secrets She Keeps. He won numerous awards including the Ned Kelly Award for the Crime Novel of the Year in 2005 for The Drowning Man, the Ned Kelly Award for the Crime Novel of the Year in 2008 for Shatter, the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger award for best crime novel in 2015 for Life or Death, and the 2018 Australian Book Industry Awards, General fiction book of the year for The Secrets She Keeps.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Robotham's high-octane fifth thriller to be published in the U.S. (after Shatter), foreign correspondent Luca Terracini is covering a series of bank heists in Baghdad that have resulted in the loss of half a billion U.S. dollars over four years. Luca thinks he's hit on a big story, especially when he meets a fellow American hired by the U.N. to conduct an audit of Iraq's questionable financial structure. Meanwhile in London, ex-cop Vincent Ruiz is robbed by a young woman, Holly Knight, and her boyfriend after he intervenes in a staged domestic dispute. But when Holly's boyfriend turns up dead, the killers turn to Ruiz and Holly, certain that she's stolen whatever they're after. Using his old connections on the force, Ruiz tries to piece together the increasingly complex puzzle, which soon points him to Richard North, a wealthy financier whose bank, Ruiz discovers with Luca's help, has ties to Iraq. Robotham, a former investigative journalist, weaves current events and white-knuckle suspense with a practiced hand. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Taut, swiftly paced thriller involving big money, big business and big government, a promising trifecta that Robotham (Shatter, 2009, etc.) works to good advantage.Long retired from the Metropolitan Police and now widowed, Vincent Ruiz (last seen in Robotham'sNight Ferry) has seen enough of life to be world-wearyand now he's got to see his daughter off into wedlock to a lawyer ("He votes Tory, but everybody does these days") and, worse, buy a new suit in the bargain. Enter a femme fataleor is she?and a good clocking, in which Ruiz is relieved of his briefcase, containing rings and a comb that belonged to his late wife. But why? Ruiz theorizes that it's a case of mistaken identity, but there's something more to it than all that. Meanwhile, American journalist Luca Terracini is poking around in Baghdad, tracking the 18th bank robbery to strike that city in a few months, mostly relieving the vaults of American reconstruction funds in crisp green dollars. Generals, soldiers, guards, civil servantsno one seems to have the answers, though a judge speaks wisely when he says, "There is a war on, Luca. Perhaps you should ask the Americans where their money is going."Well, their money, it seems, is winding up in London, where it most certainly should not be. Enter Ruiz again, indefatigable if easily bruised, and Robotham's neatly constructed plot gathers speed and strength, an elaborate game of cat and mouse that involves some unusual suspects, and with explosions to boot.About the only thing to fault Robotham for in this neat thriller is an unfortunate allusion to a Brad Pitt film best left unmentioned.That desperate slip aside, a satisfying confection, equally good for beach and airplane.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In London, a pretty young woman scams and robs retired police detective Vincent Ruiz, and he sets out to get his possessions back. In Baghdad, war correspondent Luca Terracini begins tracking millions of U.S. dollars being robbed from Iraqi banks, while a top London banker disappears under a cloud of suspicion. If these events are connected, Robotham isn't spilling the beans early. The stories spin out in brief chapters alternating between the different stories. The reader knows the three plots must intersect, but thanks to Robotham's skill at characterization and the momentum he generates within each thread, the whole cloth of this fine and ambitious thriller isn't fully apparent for hundreds of pages. Vincent, Luca, and a handful of additional characters, including Holly Knight, the young scammer, are wonderfully human smart, determined, decent, and flawed. The serpentine plot is rooted in truth; tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions in cash shipped into Baghdad in the days following the U.S. occupation did disappear. The CIA, MI6, Iraqi bagmen, disaffected London Muslims, and a creepy West Bank assassin all attempt to thwart our protagonists, and some of them have a nearly compelling rationale for their actions. All those factors, plus the almost palpable fear of violence in Baghdad after the U.S takeover, makes The Wreckage thoroughly compelling.--Gaughan, Thoma. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Michael Robotham's novel borrows from real events, like the financial crisis and the disappearance of billions of dollars in Iraq. ON his Web site, the Australian novelist Michael Robotham is prominently identified as an "international crime writer," but if you dig a little deeper, you'll discover that he worked as a journalist on Fleet Street before turning to novel-writing in 2004. Since then, he's written seven novels including his latest, "The Wreckage." That's seven books in seven years: writer's block is one problem this guy doesn't have. "The Wreckage" turns out to be the kind of international crime thriller with short, punchy chapters that shift abruptly - suspensefully, even - from London to Baghdad to Washington and other locales, just like the movies. Robotham says in his acknowledgments that the book is "based on many real-life events and documents." One such event is the disappearance, and presumed theft, of billions of dollars worth of cash that the Federal Reserve shipped to Iraq to help grease the country's wheels in the initial aftermath of the allied invasion. This really did happen. The nonfiction version was told a few years ago by the celebrated investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele in Vanity Fair. Another event, though, was the financial crisis of 2008, which, until the book's denouement, hums quietly in the background. "He's listening to the radio," Robotham writes of one of his characters, a retired detective in London. "Stories about Iraq and Afghanistan. A U.S. Senate hearing into Goldman Sachs. Accusations of reckless greed." "Here you can shoot the bad guys," an American mercenary in Baghdad says in another early passage. "In America we give them corporate bonuses and promote them to Treasury secretary." I read "The Wreckage" on vacation, on a beach in Mexico - a good call on my part; it's nothing if not a summer read. Sitting under a beach umbrella, I knocked it off in a couple of days. I don't say that disrespectfully. It's the kind of book that's meant to be knocked off. "The Wreckage" has the kind of crisp, mildly implausible dialogue that marks the modern commercial thriller. Its pleasantly convoluted plot makes sense so long as you don't examine it too closely. There are plenty of murders, chases, explosions and general mayhem. Lots of one-sentence paragraphs. You get the idea. It's also got a fistful of main characters, from the journalist in Baghdad who decides he can no longer just sit on the sidelines to the sexy United Nations accountant who falls in love with him even as she uncovers the fate of the missing billions. In London, a young woman with a troubled past robs people to pay the rent, and is being pursued by the bad guys because of a document she has unwittingly stolen. After she robs the retired detective - who is, of course, hard-bitten but with a heart o' gold - he becomes her protector. There's a hit man. Some C.I.A. operatives. A few terrorists. Is it unfair to describe the characters in "The Wreckage" as cartoonish? A little, maybe. But they're not George Smiley, either. Does it matter? Not really. Given my background as a business journalist, I found myself particularly interested in the financiers. The Bach family - Alistair, the father, and Mitchell, the son - run Mersey Fidelity, a London firm meant to bear a passing resemblance to Goldman Sachs. Even as other firms were crumbling under the weight of the crisis, Mersey Fidelity came through not just unscathed but stronger than ever. Nobody quite knows how they did it - and those who do know aren't saying. In the post-crisis world, as one character puts it, "Mersey Fidelity was being touted as the beacon of the new banking system. It's supposed to provide the Bank of England with a blueprint for new banking laws." I don't think it will ruin your enjoyment of the novel if I divulge that the Bachs are in league with the bad guys. It's pretty obvious from the start that's where "The Wreckage" is headed. Not only does it turn out that Mersey Fidelity is deeply involved in the theft of all that money in Baghdad, but there are also "whispers" about how it survived the crisis without needing a government bailout. Drug money was funneled into certain banks, keeping them alive. Regulators looked the other way, according to one character, "because it helped keep bank doors open." This is where my credulity was stretched to the breaking point. It is certainly possible that some bank, somewhere, courted drug money during the financial crisis, but it sure didn't happen on Wall Street or in London. To Robotham's credit, though, this plot twist didn't prevent me from finishing the book. He'd succeeded so well at peeling the onion slowly - it's one of his real strengths as a writer - that by the time he trotted out this notion, I had too much momentum to stop reading. Thus the real question becomes this: Will the firm get away with it, even after its crimes are exposed in the newspaper? To put it another way, is Robotham one of the tens of millions of people who are jaded and cynical and angry about the way the big banks brought the financial world to the brink of ruin, committed transgressions that were, if not illegal, certainly immoral, took bailouts from the taxpayers and then walked away scot-free, acting as if they had nothing to apologize for? Would he use his book to make a point about their mendacity? I can't tell you that, of course. It would wreck the surprise. 'Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses.' Joe Nocera is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
Library Journal Review
In hellishly violent postwar Baghdad, an emotionally scarred journalist investigates a series of suspiciously well-timed bank robberies.ÅIn deceptively serene London, a retired police detective offers a helping hand to an abused woman, only to find himself drugged, robbed, and suspected of a gruesome murder. In a peaceful English suburb, a young mother searches for her missing husband. Somewhere in the chaos of a war-blasted land, billions of U.S. dollars have vanished without a trace, and someone wants to make very sure that they stay vanished. Robotham, a former investigative journalist and author of six previous crime thrillers (e.g., Shatter), tells a fast-paced, gritty story that raises disturbing real-world questions. His Baghdad is a vividly rendered paranoid nightmare of unpredictable bomb blasts and pervasive corruption. His London, if less vividly soaked in blood and oil, is nonetheless a dangerous place for the well intentioned but ill-informed. Fans of Robotham's previous books will be glad to see continuing characters Vincent Ruiz and Joe O'Loughlin back in action. Verdict This fast-paced, gritty, and violent tale of international crime and investigation, with a sharp political edge, will appeal to readers seeking summer fiction with depth.-Bradley A. Scott, Texas A&M Univ., Corpus Christi (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.