The Oligarch’s Daughter

Finder (the Nick Heller series) delivers a fitfully arresting but hard-to-swallow thriller about an investment analyst whose life gets turned upside down after he marries a free-spirited artist. The overstuffed plot proceeds along two main tracks: in the present, Paul Brightman has shed his identity and become Grant Anderson, a New Hampshire boat builder, only to be forced on the run after a hit man tries to kill him. Flashbacks reveal how, six years earlier, Brightman left his career on Wall Street after meeting photographer Tatyana Galkin to work for her wealthy father’s shady investment company. Soon, Brightman realizes something nearly every reader will clock immediately: that he is working for an elaborate criminal organization with ties to the Kremlin. Though the plot generates some real suspense as Brightman attempts to escape the Russians using skills he learned from his paranoid, off-the-grid father, its momentum is hampered by too much backstory and too many fawning descriptions of the Galkins’ homes and luxury goods. An over-the-top deus ex machina at the climax doesn’t help matters. This is a misfire. Agent: Don Conaway, Writers House. (Jan.)