cover image Dirty Secrets

Dirty Secrets

Norman Garbo. Dutton Books, $18.95 (321pp) ISBN 978-0-525-24657-2

Intricate plotting that strains plausibility probably will not deter fans of Garbo's earlier suspense novels ( Gaynor's Passion ; Turner's Wife ; Cabal ; Spy ). When Federal Reserve Chairman Wendell Norton and the heads of five top international banks are indicted for securities fraud in New York, the stock market crashes, banks totter, world depression looms--and economist Paul Forster is asked to investigate by Finance magazine. Forster manages to locate the grown children of David Berenstein, a Nazi death camp survivor who 20 years earlier was a prison suicide after being falsely convicted of embezzlement in what may have been a frame-up by the now-indicted Fed chairman and his co-defendants. Berenstein's son Arthur now goes by the name Robert Bennet, and his daughter Helen is Melissa Kenniston. Forster has a mini-romance with Melissa (and also his ex-wife Annie) as his ingenious detective work makes him a major player in sophisticated cat-and-mouse games and deadly town-and-country gunplay (he's a Vietnam vet) while uncovering interlocking conspiracies that eventually involve a Jewish underground group, Iranian terrorists and even the White House. (May)