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Book Summary and Reviews of The Garden of Betrayal by Lee Vance

The Garden of Betrayal by Lee Vance

The Garden of Betrayal

by Lee Vance

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  • Aug 2010, 320 pages
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Book Summary

Manhattan, 2002: Mark Wallace has it all—he’s married to Claire, the love of his life; they have two bright, beautiful children, and his is a high-powered Wall Street job. Until one night while on a neighborhood errand by himself, his twelve-year-old son, Kyle, vanishes, brutally snatched off the streets of New York.

Seven years later, Kyle has never been found. The loss, guilt, and mystery surrounding their son’s disappearance have almost destroyed the Wallaces’ marriage, leaving their daughter alienated and distant. Mark has thrown himself into his work—he is now an energy markets consultant for a private hedge fund run by the father of a friend—and, though successful, is living on emotional autopilot.

Now, on the same day that a natural gas pipeline in remote western Russia is blown up by suspected terrorists, a new lead opens in Kyle’s case. When the very next day a colleague slips Mark classified information on Saudi oil production and then suddenly turns up dead, apparently a suicide, it remains for Mark, with the help of his technophile daughter and still-grieving wife, to find the sinister connections among everything that’s going on. Their personal struggle is equally compelling—three people who must once again learn how to be a family.

Politically savvy, emotionally complex, and frighteningly believable, The Garden of Betrayal is a tense and timely imagining of the casualties of recession-era Wall Street gaming and the backroom global oil wars, a riveting, compulsive read that will grip you from first page to last.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. The tension mounts relentlessly. Every short chapter offers a jolt. Plausible red herrings abound." - Booklist

"The action scenes are brief but compelling, and the financial conspiracy is believable...But his real strength is his sympathetic portrayal of a grieving family, and that takes this novel a step beyond ordinary financial thrillers. " - Library Journal

"Vance is adept at inserting complex information without slowing the pace of the action or disrupting ongoing suspense." - Publishers Weekly

"Details of international politics and technology overwhelm a potentially gripping family tale." - Kirkus

This information about The Garden of Betrayal was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Lee Vance

Lee Vance is a graduate of Harvard Business School and a retired general partner of Goldman Sachs Group. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children. This is his second novel following Restitution (2008).

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