'IF I TELL YOU WHAT I DID, JACK,
THEY'LL KILL ME.'

Jack Shepherd is the kind of lawyer people call a troubleshooter. At least that's what they call him when they're being polite.
Shepherd is the guy people go to when they have a problem too ugly to tell anyone else about. He locates the trouble and then he shoots it. Neat, huh? If life were only that simple.
He was once a Washington high-flyer, a member of the innermost circles of American political power, and a man acclaimed as the best there was at tracking international money launderers. But he abruptly walked away from all that, moved halfway around the world, and took a job teaching at the business school at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. Now he's just an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. Or is he?
A secretive Asian bank collapses under dubious circumstances and a former law partner Shepherd thought was dead surfaces as the force behind the disgraced bank. When Shepherd is coerced into helping his one-time friend track down the hundreds of millions of dollars that disappeared in the bank's collapse, he is propelled onto a twisting trail of international treachery and betrayal that drags him back into the world he thought he had put behind himself forever.
A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd lays bare a global swamp of corruption, extortion, and murder which then he is left to face alone.
A piece of cake for the troubleshooter, huh?
"MR. NEEDHAM SEEMS TO KNOW RATHER MORE THAN ONE OUGHT ABOUT THESE THINGS" - The Wall Street Journal