The Wreckage

Michael Robotham

Ex-cop Vincent Ruiz rescues a young woman from a violent boyfriend but wakes next morning to find that she's robbed him. It was a set up – an elaborate scam. Setting out to find Holly Knight, Ruiz discovers her boyfriend's tortured body and realises that powerful men are looking for the same girl. What did she steal that was so important?

Meanwhile, two thousand miles away, Pulitzer prize-winning Journalist Luca Terracini is living 'outside the wire' in Baghdad and investigating a disappearance of billions in reconstruction funds. The trail will lead him to London where he teams up with Ruiz and together they investigate the disappearance of an international banker and a mysterious 'black hole' in the bank's accounts.

Review:

“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.