Review: ‘The Phoenix Year’ by David L. Blond

Thomas Carlyle famously called economics “the dismal science.” But mixed with colorful characters, brisk action, exotic locations and generous dollops of sex, it propels an entertaining and smarter-than-average thriller from Dr. David L. Blond, The Phoenix Year.

Blond is an economic consultant whose previous employers include the United Nations, the office of the Secretary of Defense and a number of global firms. Thus it’s hard not to see him as the inspiration for his own hero: Michael Ross, an economic advisor to the president who discovers a 50-year-old conspiracy to shatter the global economy. It’s equally difficult not to imagine the long-festering frustration with institutional folly that might have prompted him to imagine a cabal of billionaires contriving to trigger a cascade of financial calamities like an elaborate domino stunt.

Wisely, Blond spices these macroeconomic machinations with a beautiful and deadly Russian spy; a resourceful CIA agent who survived the brothels of Bangkok; a female banker who abandons her principles for the dank delights of sexual submission; an overleveraged real estate tycoon whose debauched wife and daughter have been abducted into slavery, plus literal cliffhangers (the sections involving perilous climbing in the Swiss Alps are particularly compelling).

But its economic underpinnings are what distinguish The Phoenix Year from garden-variety thrillers. Blond’s intimacy with the vagaries of currency and commodities and the foibles of businessmen and bureaucrats is self-evident, lending the novel internal consistency that makes its outlandish plot plausible.

For there’s no Auric Goldfinger or Ernst Stavro Blofeld at the center of the conspiracy; the real villains of this piece are Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. Even 007 might have a tough time with those guys.

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