“The Silent Oligarch,” by Chris Morgan Jones

If a 21st-century version of Monopoly or Risk were invented, players wouldn’t acquire and trade Park Place and Marvin Gardens, or even corporations like Microsoft and Deutsche Bank. The real money is in faceless corporations with bland and non-revealing names: organizations with purposes purposely unclear, registered in secretive countries such as Russia and Liechtenstein, with boards of directors and shareholders who may or may not have anything to do with the company — indeed, who may not even exist. They’re billion-dollar corporate webs constructed not of strings of silk but of something much stronger and stickier: strings of legalese.

A massive tangle of such corporations is the nucleus of “The Silent Oligarch,” Chris Morgan Jones’s debut novel, a story of quiet suspense and international espionage. Overseeing this particular corporate tangle is Richard Lock, a divorced Brit who manages the holdings of Konstantin Malin, a Russian “silent oligarch” engaged in an elaborate money-laundering operation: Money goes out of Russia, money comes back, and a percentage of it ends up in Malin’s pockets, untraceable and untouchable. With the corporate machine in place and his own name rather than Malin’s on many of the papers, Lock has become a wealthy man. He has little to do except sun himself in Monaco — “avoiding responsibility and tax in the paradises of the world” with his girlfriend of the moment — while thinking wistfully about the ex-wife and daughter he left behind in London.

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(The Penguin Press) - ”The Silent Oligarch: A Novel” by Chris Morgan Jones.

Lock’s sybaritic life changes when Malin crosses the wrong man in a business deal: Aristotle Tourna, a Greek investor who is unhappy to find that the company in which he invested is only a shell. Secrecy is the gasoline that runs Malin’s underground multibillion-dollar economy, but Tourna makes it clear he’s ready to go to court — and suddenly Lock’s world becomes a lot more complicated: “If anyone looked hard enough . . . they would discover that he, Richard Lock, was the richest foreign investor in Russia, the owner of a huge private energy conglomerate. And he had no plausible account of how he had come by any of it.”

Meanwhile, Tourna’s operative is Benedict Webster, a former international reporter turned spy. Ten years earlier, he had been photographing human rights abuses in remote Kazakhstan with a young colleague named Inessa (the two were captured by locals and put in prison, where Inessa’s throat was slashed). Now Webster works in surveillance, and his company has been hired by Tourna. Webster’s job is to find “kompromat” — dirt, illegal activities, compromising material — on Malin and his associates, including Lock. But Malin seems to have left no footprint, and Webster begins to realize the gravity of the job he’s taken: Everyone in Russia has some kompromat, somewhere, but a man with no kompromat at all is undoubtedly both powerful and dangerous.

Jones does a nice job of keeping the focus on the people involved rather than the minutiae of corporate espionage, and his pace is leisurely but never slow. Webster is imperturbable, even as his contacts begin dying under mysterious circumstances, but the story is really Lock’s, a tale of a white-collar stooge whose life becomes one long, cold sweat. By the end, he’s not sure if Webster is the man who will destroy or save him.

“Every Russian is corrupt according to his station in life,” one character explains. “Malin expected to be a mid-level technocrat taking a few million a year from the odd opportunity here and there. But he has managed to make himself a player and now it’s hundreds of millions, maybe billions. . . . Lock is a great man for millions, but for billions he’s out of his depth.” Lock’s wife puts it more simply: “You work for a corrupt man in a corrupt business in a corrupt country, and it has corrupted you.” It’s a billion-dollar gambit, but the lesson of Richard Lock will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office, no matter how humble: Nobody is irreplaceable.

Kevin Allman is a writer and editor who lives in New Orleans.

THE SILENT OLIGARCH

By Chris Morgan Jones

Penguin Press. 312 pp. $25.95