The Ascendant by Drew Chapman

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 7, 2014

Like Christopher Reich's recently released The Prince of Risk, The Ascendant starts as a financial thriller that involves a secretive decision by the Chinese to sell U.S. Treasury bonds. It even features a woman named Alex, as does Reich's novel. In most other respects, the novels follow very different paths. Both are fun escapist fiction, but The Ascendant is the more absorbing of the two.

The Ascendant begins in China with a village in revolt and a mysterious young woman known as "the Tiger," then shifts to New York where 26-year-old Garrett Reilly, a bond analyst with a gift for pattern recognition, discovers that Treasury bonds are being dumped on the market in a way that will create economic panic and devalue the dollar. A small military working group, believing the Chinese have declared war and impressed with Reilly's ability to predict events that military analysts missed, recruits Reilly to lead a project called Ascendant.

Reilly, who can easily clobber four tough guys in a bar fight, isn't your typical Wall Street analyst. He's your typical thriller hero to the extent that he's an arrogant loner who likes to drink and womanize, but he has the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes and, unlike most thriller heroes, he has a passionate hatred of the U.S. military. Where the main character in Reich's novel is a typical "master of the universe" hedge fund boss, Drew Chapman's protagonist is a refreshingly quirky antisocial misfit who cares more about computer games than financial power. When he's recruited to do his patriotic duty by joining the Defense Intelligence Agency, he tells the Secretary of Defense to stuff it. His unorthodox approach to heroism makes Garrett an appealing character, at least to readers who like antiheroes.

The other characters are an assemblage of recognizable types (the hawkish Secretary of Defense, the socially awkward computer hackers, the military officer who must decide whether his duty is to follow orders or to do what's right) but they are developed with sufficient care to give each a believable place in the world. The other character who deviates from the norm (while playing only a small role) is Hu Mei, the charismatic leader of a rebel movement in China, who inspires millions by being kind and cheerful.

Although there aren't many of them, the scenes that take place in China capture the nation's essence (something I would not say is true of Reich's novel). Readers who are looking for an emphasis on finance will probably prefer Reich's novel, but I appreciated Chapman's imaginative look at how the manipulation of images might give rise to a social revolution. Apart from some silliness in the middle of the novel (Garrett has to win a simulated military battle to keep his job), The Ascendant seemed like a credible story while I was reading it. After I put it down, I thought "no, that couldn't happen," but the point of escapist fiction is to engage the reader during the process of reading and The Ascendant did that.

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