Critic

What the Most Hyped Financial Thriller of the Summer Gets Right

The Banker’s Wife, a new novel from Cristina Alger, tracks a group of globe-trotting financial criminals and the women who love them.

Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Money is haircuts whenever you want. Money, also, is the ability to have people killed. In Cristina Alger’s new novel, The Banker’s Wife (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27), a world of wealth is one of both heady excess and rotting corruption.

A lot of rich men throw their money and power around in this thriller peppered with British secret agents, encrypted messages, and murders to solve. Thankfully, a few good women are prepared to take them to task.