Town Resident Pens Financial Thriller

For today we have another Greenwich author, making his debut as a novelist by drawing on his decades of experience as an international investment banker.

Although H.T. Narea lives here with his family, his roots are in Chile and Spain’s Basque country, the latter the home of the founder of the Jesuits who was born Inigo de Loyola in Guipuzcoa. I don’t know whether this fact influenced Narea to attend Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where in his first year he met his wife Connie, the daughter of the late Paul Erdman, the Canadian-born author of financial thrillers who must have been one of the rare novelists who was regularly reviewed on the financial pages.

Connie Narea went from Georgetown’s Foreign Service School to a job as an analyst with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (or “DIA”) in Washington, and H.T. took some time from his financial career to help his father-in-law as a researcher on two of his novels, The Swiss Account and The Set-Up, and a slightly apocalyptic non-fiction book What Next? I mention all this to show that Narea has avoided a frequent pitfall for those who try to write spy or police procedural or medical stories, when they are essentially clueless as to intelligence work or what cops and doctors really do.

His new novel, The Fund, is described on the jacket as “a financial apocalyptic thriller,” and that is a fair enough description. The heroine Kate Molares is a Georgetown Foreign Service alumna whose father, a UN veteran, lives in Old Greenwich. Kate works for the DIA and is hot on the trail of an Islamist hedge fund entrepreneur - coincidentally a Georgetown classmate and sometime lover - known as Nebibi (Egyptian for ‘panther’) who plans to use a huge Sharia-compliant fund to screw up the world’s financial markets, along with some other more explosive mischief. When Kate meets him years after he ditched her, it is at Meli-Melo on The Avenue.

There are also sinister Venezuelan ruffians in the employ of President Chavez, who has his fingers in this pie. When Kate went for a jog at Tod’s Point, two of them tried to attack her - though why she never called the Greenwich PD was unclear to me since, Tod’s being what it is, bagging the ruffians would have seemed very likely. Maybe it’s just that Kate had the usual Fed notion that all local cops are from Dogpatch.

Sticking wisely with what he knows, Narea sets his plots in South America, Spain’s Basque separatist movement, and the banking tax haven of Gibraltar. To stir up the pot more than a little, the closing on Nebibi’s huge fund, in which a leading investor, er, sucker was a mega-rich guy living on a modest 100 acres in back-country Greenwich, coincided with his plot to plant a dirty bomb (radioactive cobalt) on Gibraltar at a sovereignty conference attended by the Prince of Wales and his Spanish counterpart.

Add to this spicy broth a drug to stoke up terrorists and bombers, on which Kate had stumbled when a UN friend told her about laboratory cats chasing dogs, a mole in the US Government, and the usual bumbling of any investigation. Narea brings it all together in a financial apocalypse about which it would be unfair to say more.

But I will say this: for a long time in the spook business, following ‘the gold seam,’ that is, following movements of the money with which bad guys fund espionage or terrorist violence, has been an important part of catching them.  Narea knows his way around finance, and has put together a knowledgeable thriller with the added plus of plenty of local color from Greenwich to Gibraltar.

Turning to purely local affairs, the Cos Cob Mystery Book group will have its final meeting before the autumn at the Library on Saturday, July 9^th, at 1 p.m.  The book for discussion is The Salaryman’s Wife by Sujata Massey.  Her heroine Rei Shimura, a Japanese-American English teacher, becomes involved in a murder in the ancient castle town of Shiroyama, coincidentally the last stronghold of the samurai before their defeat by Government forces in 1877.  Ms. Massey is an unusual author; if you’re not familiar with her, google or yahoo her website which is full of interesting tidbits on her, her heroine, and Japan.