It is 1993, the banking world is in turmoil, and in New Jersey, there is outright panic. The big New York banks and emerging regionals are gobbling up everything in the state. Every financial institution is now both predator and prey. The Fed has opened the floodgates, and traditional banking ethics are disappearing. At a used book sale, Jim Fairmont, a career banker having worked for First State Bank for more than twenty-five years, finds a blank, signed invoice belonging to an auto parts supplier. The document is contained in a box of books donated by Larry McBride, a new-breed, brash, thirty-three-year-old former New York banker. McBride had been hired by First State Bank to give it credibility in its defensive entry into international banking and who, like Jim, is an avid book collector. Alerted by McBride's strange behavior at the book sale as he searched for something, which Jim suspects was the invoice, Jim begins to investigate McBride's relationships with some of First State's customers. What he uncovers is much bigger than he ever imagined, involving clearly unethical conduct and questionable international asset movements. His discoveries put him in the sights of New Jersey's underworld who are determined to protect McBride and his clients, putting not only Jim's life in danger, but those of his close associates' as well.