The prologue foreshadows John March's mental state. It doesn't take a psychology major to understand this is a troubled man who is adrift. Cleverly woven through this story is the background of his personal tragedy. The son and grandson of a small wealthy merchant banking family in New York, March opted to follow a career in law enforcement and became as a deputy sheriff in upstate New York.

Disasters struck there and March retreated to the city a widower, to become a private investigator. He had spent some of his college years on Wall Street so his knowledge, friends and support systems remained intact in the city.

As the story opens an attorney friend for whom March often worked makes arrangements for him to meet with Rick Pierro. Pierro started in a family of blue collar laborers and through charm, education and hard work made it to the level that he is now being considered for a promotion to the Executive Committee of his bank. Any hint of any impropriety would prevent his rise to power.

With further to fall than most, and competing in a vicious environment, Pierro immediately seeks counsel when he receives an e-mail which purports to be a copy of a memo he had received from the treasurer of a large competing bank nearly 20 years ago. The memo essentially verifies an attachment that sets forth transactions he was involved in with a foreign corporation. Not a problem, except the corporation in question had been a conduit for the largest money-laundering bank in the world.

That money-laundering bank is now in receivership. It owned a huge mess of shell corporations in countries that had made a business of catering to their major clients, drug dealers, pornographers, terrorists, etc. The investigation that had toppled it began with a drug bust of an executive who then traded knowledge for immunity. This brought in the DEA, to be followed by the SEC, the FBI, and all other acronyms that pertain to the financial world. The FBI agent in charge is a personal nemesis of March, and the Assistant District Attorney is determined at all cost to make her career from this case.

Pierro is stunned by the e-mail and the implicit threat that the extortionist is just waiting to make his demand. He assures March that if he can buy the person's silence for a short period of time, the executive committee will meet, appoint him, and thereafter he will be clothed with the protection of the really big boys.

In the winding up part of the Worldwide Bank receivership, scores of accountants and security people had been hired to sort out the very complex and poor records of the bank. These people are trying to establish the validity of claims against the bank, while reconstructing balance sheets in trying to figure out the real assets. The book is timely, inasmuch as that is a present day scenario on Wall Street.

March starts his investigation with a contact that gets him into the inner workings of the receivership, and he begins to trace the correspondence to and from the treasurer on that date, at the same tine trying to figure out who could have accessed this same data. The book picks up speed when March discovers a link to Pierro's wife in the treasurer's now near empty office.

Black Maps is complex, not only from the standpoint of the plot line, but also because it is filled with an expertise about the banking world (both domestic and international) and Wall Street that can only be acquired through the experience the author brings to the book. It also would help if the reader has more than a simple basic knowledge of computer systems.

This book was an absorbing and fascinating page-turner. Spiegelman is indeed a skilled writer and does all things well - imagery, dialogue, segues - while maintaining a high level of suspense. However, unless a reader understands or enjoys complicated legal and financial problems, it may be too dry for some tastes.

--Thea Davis