A Calculated Risk

When Verity (True) Banks was 22, she was the highest-ranking woman executive at the world's largest bank. Now, 10 years later, she is contemplating a caper that will reveal the bank's security to be inadequate, and that will surely earn her a position at the Federal Reserve. Before she can carry out her plan to break into the bank's electronic security system, her erstwhile mentor, Dr. Zoltan Tor, reappears with a challenge: Which of them can steal $1 billion, and invest it to earn $30 million in only three months? (Of course, the money will be returned, and no one will be injured.) In the process, Tor and True, with help from a crew of brilliant eccentrics, stumble on a plan by members of the Vagabond Club CEOs of major corporations-,to take over the Bank of the World, possibly sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin. Alternately sounding like a romance novel ( . . . he was tanned and golden, his coppery hair tumbling to the collar of his white silk shirt) and a text on banking (All federally chartered banks must be members of the Fed, and are required to maintain insurance deposits there. . . ), True's story proceeds haltingly, disrupted by frequent recaps and descriptions of her emotional states (my mood progressed from real fury-to intense determination-to righteous indignation-to helpless frustration-to miserable desperation-at last to hopeless exhaustion). Although Neville (The Eight) obviously knows a great deal about the world of finance, she fails to deliver the goods as a novelist. (Nov.)