If, in the current era of WorldCom, Enron, etc., you are inclined to believe most people associated with finance are crooks at best or, at worst, planning to take over the world, you will love The Month of the Leopard. The book is very fast-paced and moves from the capitals of Europe to the farthest outposts of Estonia, following the nefarious actions of the villains. It helps to have a conspiratorial outlook on the way the world operates to relate to the plot. If this is your cup of tea, this book is for you.

Tom Bracewell is a run-of-the-mill financial analyst specializing in the unexciting area of emerging Eastern European economies. He is married to Tatyana, a lady with a mysterious past. This past includes having control of billions of dollars acquired under unclear circumstances and stashed in Swiss bank accounts. Tatyana manages to keep this a complete secret from everyone but the book’s villain by living an upper-middle class life in a London suburb. Tom does not find it overly strange that his wife seems to have no past before meeting him while she was a cabaret singer in Estonia. The fact that she appears to have been born at about age 25 via Immaculate Conception only becomes an issue for him when she vanishes.

Sarah Turnbull is an analyst working for a large, mysterious, and wildly successful hedge fund managed by Jean-Pierre Telmont, a megalomaniac former student radical with a somewhat autocratic management style. Telmont is determined to collapse the financial markets of the world to achieve, in a somewhat delayed fashion, the takeover of Eastern Europe by the more covert segments of the former Soviet Union. Sarah crosses paths with Tom when Tatyana mysteriously dumps him to contemplate using her fabulous fortune and warns Tom not to come looking for her. Unsurprisingly, Tom ignores this advice and joins forces with Sarah to save the world financial systems and to find his wayward wife. He is also now very curious about Tatyana’s lack of a background.

Make no mistake, the bad guys in this book are bad, very bad. They specialize in sadomasochism as well as other forms of persuasion. Telmont’s henchmen also seem to know everything about everyone on a near-instantaneous basis. Sarah’s father had catastrophically crossed paths with Telmont, who found this prior encounter the perfect reason to hire Sarah so she could bring about his ultimate destruction. Does it really seem rational that dedicated evildoers executing apparently well-thought-out plans of massive conquest go out of their way to hire employees who have reasons to hate them under the best of circumstances and then give them access to their most confidential information?

Much of the sabotage of Telmont’s plan is accomplished by the application of some form of tampering with computer systems for the execution of financial trades and the display of real-time market information. This requires stealing passwords and understanding some fascinating oversights in the design of automated trading programs. The stealing of passwords is presented here as exceptionally easy to do if you are an employee with a reason to dislike the head evildoer. Equally implausible is the key to Telmont’s maneuvering. This involves late1980s-based computer technology: calling into the computers at the mysterious hedge fund on a phone modem and taking control of a modern, automated financial trading system at a critical moment. Any readers with hands-on practice making remote connections via phone modems to computers they have clear authorization to use will find this a most unlikely way to save the free world.

James Harland is the pen name of a London-based journalist who covers topics related to finance. Overall, I found The Month of the Leopard to be a quick and enjoyable read. The underlying premise - that financial markets are prone to manipulation through exploitation of the herd instinct of the market participants - is as intriguing as it is probable. It would have been more interesting (though maybe not more entertaining) if the mechanism used to foil the villain had been less implausible and the characters a bit more complex. If you are a conspiracy theorist who mistrusts financial analysts, you may find this book to be a perfect 5.

--Jim Plonka