This is not a robbery. A bank is taken with all its guts: accounts, debts, points of exchange, the staff to the last secretary, the building. This is beautiful and clean fraud.
I was out of work, while all around you could smell millions, even in the air outside. It was an unforgettable smell of public debt, oilfields, gold, bank guarantees, diamonds... I wanted to breathe in the air of easy cash Moscow, to revel and roll in this air. I could feel the smell of money in the wind on my face. This air was used to make up funds overnight, to make a fortune, to go rack and ruin and then grow rich again. It was going free across the wreckage of the sold out Soviet empire.
I was asked to help redeem the debts of a bank. The insider man at the bank held the post of Vice President.
A bit of danger and a bit of love.
This novel is not based on real events, but you will feel the reality in every word.
By Jo Ammons
If you feel like reading a complex thriller that manages to deliver fast-paced action and raise some thought-provoking questions at the same time, then ‘The Dead Bank Diary’ by Russian author Anna Schlegel is the best choice you can make. It’s true that you won’t find cops, killings, and bloody scenes in this book, but you will find something better: money, frauds, incredible schemes that can either pump up a bank or bankrupt it. And the best part is that all these are inspired from real events that the author herself experienced when she was working in the field of finance.
The story focuses on an intriguing and mysterious character: Victor. The narrator, Ann, meets Victor when she is in terrible need of a job and accepts to work with him even if his schemes involve financial fraud. In an interview, the author said that Victor was actually based on a real person she worked with in Moscow, a retired foreign intelligence service officer and a magnificent fraudster who changed Anna Schlegel’s life forever. Thanks to him, she saw what kind of frauds were possible in the banking system and understood what a genius financer could do if he wanted to.
Ann and Victor make a great team, and readers will find it easy to relate to them. The author is brilliant when it comes to character development, and she has invested a lot in their creation. Victor is intriguing, complex, and unpredictable. He had a difficult, yet exciting life, and readers will want to learn more about his past and his goals. He is one of the characters that drive the action, and all his schemes and plans are like puzzles which the readers will try to solve by the end of the novel.
‘The Dead Bank Diary’ is the first book in Anna Schlegel’s series of financial thrillers. The second book, ‘For Those in the Shade’, will be released soon. However, each installment can be read as a standalone novel. These edge-of-your seat thrillers have everything they need to become bestsellers, and they certainly are must-reads for fans of the genre. The action in ‘The Dead Bank Diary’ is incredibly realistic, and readers will ask themselves how much of it is fiction, and how much is real. Also, the author painted such a perfect, vivid image of the cold and gloomy Moscow that you couldn’t imagine the events in the book happening in a different city.
