Author: Jonathan Rush

Title: Due Diligence

Publisher: Thomas Dunne

Due Diligence is an invitation into the high-stakes world of investment banking, which, it turns out, is a lot like high-stakes poker: it's all about who blinks first.

That metaphor figures prominently in the debut novelist from Jonathan Rush, the pen name for a strategy consultant for the kind of corporations described in the book.

Describing it as a "thriller" is mildly open to interpretation. If being in the board room on conference call during the final days of a massive corporate takeover is your idea of thrilling, Rush will have you all the way. If it isn't, there's not enough here to draw in casual readers. Ironically, what Rush does have going for him - the fact that the mysterious cloak-and-dagger dealings of the upper echelons of Fortune 500's are a closely-guarded secret - is also one of the novel's biggest disadvantages.

Diligence's appeal lies in the fact that these are areas of life few ever witness. But they're also proceedings fraught with technicalities that only an employee of the SEC can fully unravel. Rush does his best to sort it out, but in the end, it's not the finance content that causes Diligence to sag; it's the story-telling.

The story is cast in the rather generic man-against-evil-corporation vein, a la The Firm. Rob Holding, a rookie with Wall Street investment bank Dyson Whitney is the man; utilities giant Louisiana Light is the corporation. Holding is part of a team tasked with clearing the way for Louisiana Light to acquire rival BritEnergy. He's the archetypal dirt-digger: young, idealistic, and still possessed of enough of a conscience that the underhanded dealings of Louisiana Light and its slimy CEO Mike Wilson still bother him.

When he begins conducting Dyson Whitney's "due diligence," the part of any takeover where one party combs through the other's fine print, he uncovers more red flags than a health inspection at a taco joint. Then, the aforementioned conscience kicks in, and Holding is on the horns of the proverbial moral dilemma.

At times, this feels like a debut. Rush plays to his strengths, and the sections on numbers and the massive jousting of egos involved when giant corporations go head to head are particularly well-done. To what extent these characters were based on real people remains up for debate, but the fact that he's opted for a pen name suggests Rush crafted these characters from personal experience. When Rush attempts to attempts to build a personal life for Rob to round out his character, however, he's less successful.

The relationship between Holding and his girlfriend Emmy feels more like an obligatory attempt to make Holding more sympathetic than something Rush is genuinely interested in. The generic plot also means we have a good sense where things are going before they do. Sooner or later, Rob gets too close to the truth and must run for his life from security thugs. Suffice it to say, he's like Mulder or Scully, but we're talking about fudged balance sheets, not unexplained creatures from outer space.

Regardless of a reader's grasp of the nuances of high finance, Rush does manage to provide the reader a scary view of how easy it is for so many "dirty deals" to get done. We've created a system with so little oversight that a lot of insects wind up slithering through the loopholes.

*This article first published 5/24/2011