The Silent Oligarch

By: Christopher Morgan Jones

Narrated by: Jason Culp

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 he 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.

©2012 Christopher Jones (P)2012 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"From Chris Morgan Jones, an absolutely terrific novel. It''s about international intrigue - but the real deal. The Silent Oligarch is beautifully written, clean and terse, but you won't notice, because you''ll be reading just as fast as you can. Very highly recommended, and you''ll want more." (Alan Furst, author of Spies of the Balkan and Night Soldiers)

"A beautifully written thriller about how the power of money has been replacing the power of the state in the former Soviet Union, and how the West is no closer to understanding the way things work there than we ever were... The Silent Oligarch is a smashing debut that will leave most readers anxious to follow Webster on his next assignment." (Connecticut Post)

“An understated debut that carries a special resonance in the wake of Putin’s bare-knuckled presidential victory. The plot hinges on three men - one bad, one good and one gutless - whose work revolves around the billions of dollars and other assets that slither in and out of opaque jurisdictions stretching from the Cayman Islands to Vanuatu. Like the spies in a John le Carre novel, they are surprisingly plausible… Jones handles the large cast of characters and shifting venues with grace.” (Bloomberg)

An Intelligent Captivating Thriller

This is absolutely one of the best books I have listened to in the past couple of years. It's a combination political thriller, mystery, and good ole novel. The story centers around the moral dilemma of the man in charge of laundering money for a wealthy and politically influential Russian oligarch. The novel is a nice change from the America versus Islamist terrorist/China/Iran plots that seem to compromise most political thrillers. This is one reason I have been listening to more British and European-based writers recently. Christopher Morgan Jones writes knows who to write a an intelligent thriller that informs and entertains the reader. This is also a rare instance where it truly feels like the narrator is the one who wrote the book. Five stars all around.