The Prince of Risk: A Novel

The Prince of Risk by Christopher Reich is what may politely be classified as a financial thriller. Our hero is a wheeler-dealer on Wall Street, and he’s shorting the Chinese currency. If he’s right and the yuan falls, he’ll add to his fortune. Unfortunately, there’s a major conspiracy in motion to disrupt trading across all markets, and our hero just happens to receive a key piece of information at the right time. Meanwhile, his ex-wife, who’s a special agent with the FBI, is hot on the trail of some terrorists.

Well, as you might expect in a plot that’s designed to tick all the boxes in the “How to Write a Thriller” handbook, the two investigations are linked and America is saved thanks to our reunited dynamic duo. Frankly this is one tedious cliché after another as we grind through explanations of how Wall Street banking systems work and then have people try to kill each other — all attempts on key good and bad guys are unsuccessful until the end; everyone else is canon fodder. It’s all rather sad. There probably could have been a good thriller based on these ideas, but the plotting and writing here are threadbare.