It’s not often you can read a thriller with almost more dead bodies than pages, and still have a happy ending, but Cristina Alger’s The Banker’s Wife delivers with a fast-paced mystery thriller loaded with international espionage and financial deceit.

The obscenely wealthy hiding money in Swiss bank accounts seems trite, but this premise expands to politicians and shady Ponzi schemes in Alger’s story.  The chapters alternate between two women, Annabel who is the banker’s wife, and Martina, the dedicated journalist about to give up her investigative career to marry the son of a Presidential hopeful.  Although unknown to each other, both are highly reliable narrators (this is not a “Girl” book), and the two women are on track to disclose the same off-shore banking crime: ““A world of dirty money, hidden away in shadow accounts, and it belongs to some very powerful and dangerous people…”

Annabel’s husband Matthew, who works for the Swiss bank which handles lucrative but illegal funds, suddenly dies in a plane crash.  Martina’s mentor, Duncan, who has been working with an inside whistleblower, suddenly dies in his house.  Both women are literally left holding the bag, or in this case, the computers and USB’s containing the incriminating information.  Both are dodging bullets, literally and figuratively, as they try to find trustworthy men (there are not many in this story) who will get the information out via the international news corps, and stop the masterminds controlling the action from escaping justice.

Cited as a “financial thriller,” The Banker’s Wife has the timeliness of political and banking deceit in the news that has become all too familiar.  The story is a page-turner with new developments around the bend of every cliff-hanging narrow road in the Swiss countryside, and the ending takes a satisfying turn. What a great movie this would make.