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Peter David Shapiro's novel The Trail of Money is an interesting and easy read, loaded with suspense, and it comes with an ending that took me completely by surprise. Shapiro has a disarmingly straightforward prose style that innocently sets us up to be shaken a bit, maybe even frightened, by the brutal world of big-money east Asian power brokers in which the story is set. We've all seen journalistic accounts of globalization and the opportunities for corruption and abuse of power it creates, but The Trail of Money brings all this painfully to life. Shapiro makes us feel the greed and amoral destructiveness that accompanies the hand-in-glove relationship between corporate clout and political power that seems an inescapable fact of contemporary life, whether in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, or, for that matter, the U.S.
Shapiro writes to entertain, and he succeeds in doing just that. However, this is an author who has done his homework. He understands and graphically portrays the nerve-wracking powerlessness that many of us share in a world where commonly used categories of politics and economics -- democracy, capitalism, communism, pluralism, libertarianism ... -- have ceased to differ one from the other, with all subsumed by an indifferent but menacing world-wide plutocracy. A hopeless set of circumstances where the only good that comes is by accident, or so it seems.
Shapiro, however, also understands that we live in a world where one still finds strong-willed, intelligent, creatively engaged individuals. As a result, even immeasurable wealth, and power organized on a continental scale have their limits. Ironically, moreover, in the Trail of Money the heroes and heroines do not come from the ranks of political activists, social reformers, or progressive do-gooders of any sort. Instead, they are some pretty ordinary people for whom making the world a better place may be a nice idea, but first they want to make a comfortable living for themselves and their families while maintaining their integrity and, at least occasionally, having a good time.
Yes, there are plenty of villains and a lot of large-scale evil in Shapiro's book. But his main characters are motivated by very ordinary personal factors, things like falling in love, doing their jobs well, being a good friend, and, when circumstances force their hand, avenging harm done to those they care about. In the process, they sometimes trip themselves up, mistaking friend for enemy and enemy for friend, causing hurt feelings, and, at least for the short-term, generating ill-will. Often enough, however, they manage to set things right, though, inevitably, some are lost along the way. After all, Shapiro is a realist.
The Trail of Money is a well-crafted thriller set in a thoroughly modern context, one that any of us can appreciate as an important part of the world we live in. It's true that Shapiro occasionally makes getting things done in such an environment seem a bit easier than is plausible. Still, this is a good read, one that has prompted me to look for copies of Shapiro's earlier work, expecting that it, too, will be to my taste.
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