NEST OF VIPERS by Linda Davies - SIGNED BOOK - ADVANCE READING COPY

Sarah Jensen - smart, ambitious, independent, and beautiful - is one of the most successful currency traders in the City of London. When the governor of the Bank of England invites her to his office, she's intrigued. When he explains that he suspects someone at the notoriously cutthroat Inter-Continental Bank of corrupt trading practices, she's not entirely surprised. But when he asks her to go undercover for him working at the bank, to discover and document the corruption, she's initially shocked. Why her? First, he says, because she knows the ins and outs of trading better than anyone else. And second, because due to her reputation as a bit of a wild card no one will imagine she could be working for the government. The glamour of all the secrecy, and the challenge of working for the government, prove too hard to resist, so Sarah agrees to go along. It all seems, at the beginning, on the up-and-up. James Bartrop, the director of Counter-Narcotics Crime at M16, has spent years tracking Anthony Fieri, a powerful Mafia financier whose long and illustrious career has included everything from drug and arms smuggling to political fixing and simple assassination. Bartrop now believes that Fieri has entered new territory, and is the invisible hand behind an elaborate scheme to take tens of millions of "legitimate" dollars out of the international currency markets. Bartrop will stop at nothing to find a clear, provable path through the complex web of financial fraud back to Fieri. Sarah soon uncovers clues to an illegal scheme reaping multimillion-dollar profits for a small group of corrupt traders, and she begins secretly gathering evidence to expose it. But when a friend and a colleague at the bank are murdered, she realizes there is much more going on than anyone is telling her, and that the fraud extends way beyond the world of merchant banking...