Four specialists came to the Zurich suite in ten days. Each gave a different diagnosis. None of them was right.
The man in the bed is Robert Powell, and he has been the most powerful person in the country for a long time. His heart was opened by a surgeon who took a clean workup and performed an operation that should never have happened. The heart was sewn shut, and the pounding did not stop. Nobody can say why a heart that has been looked at and pronounced clean is still keeping a time no one else can hear.
Then a woman comes up from the street in a gray coat, carrying a wooden box, and asks the one question nobody asked: what happens between the surges?
Six thousand miles away, the family firm loses five percent of its value in the first eleven minutes of September's second trading day. Nine billion dollars, gone before lunch, and no analyst note explains it. Because the market is not moving. The market is being moved.
THE FOURTH DAUGHTER is a novel of two machines: a body that keeps its own accounting, and a family that has spent a hundred and forty years learning the difference between a market that is moving and a market that is being moved. At the center of both is a ledger the family never meant anyone to read, thirty names that have no street and no register, and a page with a fourth daughter written on it to make the family look whole.
Somebody has the key. Somebody knew which drawer.
A financial and medical thriller of cold, precise prose, in the tradition of the novels that treat money and medicine as the same kind of system: legible, dangerous, and always keeping score.
