Clues and cash keep flowing

Patricia LEWIN’S feverish “Out of Reach” is about deceit, deception, dissembling, endless mystification, invigorating hatred and satisfying revenge.

An underground trade is going on in children shanghaied for export, or for abuse by pedophiles right here at home. A cold, villainous German general, attached to his country’s Washington embassy and, hence, protected by diplomatic privilege, trades in slaves, intelligence secrets and anything that keeps the cash flowing. And a professional kidnapper of uncanny skill, a super-illusionist who has scorched lives for decades, extends his evil trade. You want to hang them and their coven from a trail of lampposts, but urban sanitation has no provision for it. All you can do is watch as FBI agent Alec Donovan and mettlesome Erin Baker, once one of the walking wounded, now with the CIA, pursue the skulking slavers, are in turn pursued and finally get the better of the furtive creeps who are surprised to get some of their own medicine from an intended victim. This taut and engaging thriller moves nimbly through failure, frustration and misidentification to an explosive finale.

Stars that go astray spark disorder in Jodi Compton’s “The 37th Hour.” A meteor shower stirs sibling sentiments that shouldn’t be, disarrays a family and, later, impels a mazy tale of justice gone awry. What justice? The clear case against a rapist-murderer is dismissed on a technicality, driving the victim’s mother to depression and that mother’s police associates to the sort of action that the court had dodged. We don’t expect retribution from the judicial process and only vaguely wish that private enterprise might make up for it. But that’s merely one strand in Compton’s tangled web involving Det. Sarah Pribek, who has just married a fellow Twin Cities cop, Michael Shiloh.

When her husband suddenly goes missing, Pribek sets out to search for him. Her inquiries inevitably get tangled in cold or lukewarm cases and festering family sores far out in Shiloh’s past. Nor is it clear what kind of cop Pribek is. When using her cellphone, she keeps her eye on the road and that’s one point in her favor. But her mind wanders too often; so do her feelings and so, at times, does our attention. When Shiloh at last turns up, encumbering memories come with him as do less-than-convincing explanations. And yet the tale is engrossing, the characters are beguiling and Compton’s tangled web deceives pretty effectively.

In “Shadow Account,” Stephen Frey’s latest monetary extravaganza, smoke and mirrors rule. Conner Ashby toils for Gavin Smith, a Wall Street legend now head of Phenix Capital, a boutique firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions. An up-and-coming man, Conner works with the boss on “special” projects but, as the book opens, he’s deep into a special project of his own: making love to blond, leggy, sexy Liz Shaw. He steps out to get her cigarettes, returns to find his apartment wasted, his mistress slaughtered and himself running for his life pursued by a wild shooter.

Meanwhile, in parallel action, small, fragile Lucas Avery works in the West Wing as deputy assistant political director to the president. The president’s chief of staff enlists Lucas to head a secret project that turns into a wild goose chase. One in New York, the other in Washington, D.C., Conner and Lucas are manipulated by powerful figures they look up to, but also by darker, more ruthless villains, hard to identify except as cat’s-paws of a politico-financial complex that holds the country in a poisonous grip.

That’s what maculates the plot. Up for reelection, the president means to drum up support by changing the corporate landscape. Bankers don’t like the idea; party leaders fear regulatory reforms; the Treasury secretary himself looks like a rotten apple. As for Frey’s simile-heroes, they have to run a gantlet of arrogant dolts, terrified toadies, serial liars, lurky aggressors and one-dimensional bystanders. Intricate and involuted, Conner’s and Lucas’ snarled stories, told in antiphon, stagger and weave through desolate landscapes of the nation’s two capitals before they end in bloodbaths: good, goading stuff that leaves one all atingle.

But that’s not Frey’s main point: “Shadow Account” unfolds as a tutorial about financial sleight of hand, its fraudulent details, disastrous fallout and outlandish terminology. Price-earning multiples, stock options, option grants, insider dealings, undocumented loans are translated, detailed, parsed. The text bristles with fake revenues, hollow receivables, pumped-up earnings per share, massive liabilities, falsified entries, bookkeeping “baked in fraud ovens,” multibillion-dollar transactions and, of course, shadow accounts. Almost anything is possible if accountants play along, and they do. Companies prosper, wobble, crash and burn. Their executives come out of prison two years later, refreshed, ready to claim the millions they have stashed away. This is the sort of fiction that skates dangerously close to truth, though happily never close enough to warrant litigation.

Frey throws in short courses in spycraft, equitycraft, Beltwaycraft, boursecraft and forensic accounting, all handy for readers envisaging careers in investment banking. Unfortunately, going by the evidence he provides, professional life expectancy in that line of work is uncertain. Which may be why the author, an alumnus of mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan and now managing director of a private equity firm, has turned to this tonic string of mayhem. *