I gave up posting about the too-numerous mysteries that I read unless I find something particularly interesting or heinous about a book. In this case, the subject of the latest title in the Prey series featuring Lucas Davenport happened to coincide with a startling little item I saw in Time. Stolen Prey features a variety of crimes that all end up revolving around money being laundered through a bank in Minneapolis by a Mexican drug cartel. The book's mix of mayhem and sleuthing is typical for a Davenport mystery, and I might have dismissed the whole money laundering scheme as a figment of Sandford's fertile imagination if I hadn't read this in Time:
97.4% = Portion of Colombian cocaine profits (about $300 billion) reaped by criminals and laundered by banks in first-world countries.
Yikes!!! After recently reading half of Michael Lewis's The Big Short (I am too shallow to get through the whole thing), I am primed to have a negative response to almost everything I read about the financial industry, but this is ridiculous! Wasn't the PATRIOT Act supposed to stop money laundering? Guess we lost our Fourth Amendment rights for nothing . . . again! (Sorry--sometimes a good rant just comes bubbling up.)
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