Norb Vonnegut is the seriously underappreciated author of three glittery thrillers about fiscal malfeasance. This may not sound like a red-hot franchise, but he has made it one. With “Top Producer” (2009), “The Gods of Greenwich” (2011) and now “The Trust,” he is three for three in his own improbably sexy genre.  Mr. Vonnegut dreams up diabolically elegant business crimes, then sends smart-talking characters to follow the money. He draws upon his own Wall Street experience (with Morgan Stanley, among other employers) to provide the sound of insider acumen. “I’ve had 14 managers over the last 10 years,” Grove O’Rourke says at the start of the new book. Grove was the stockbroker hero of “Top Producer,” and now he’s back for an encore.  “I’d call them an endangered species,” he says about his string of callous, browbeating bosses, “except the supply is endless.”  Grove is first seen in “The Trust” crouching under his desk at a Wall Street firm called SKC, to have a private phone conversation. So he’s glad to escape these confines when this book throws temptation his way. After a sailing “accident” kills Palmer Kincaid, Grove’s client and mentor, Grove is invited to become a trustee of Kincaid’s Palmetto Foundation. This philanthropic organization is based in Charleston, S.C., one of the very picturesque destinations that “The Trust” finds time to visit. Sullivan’s Island and the Turks and Caicos Islands are others.  A lot will happen to Grove during his Palmetto adventure. He will eventually come back to SKC bruised and bloodied. When he does, his colleagues are typically solicitous. “Nice face, Grove,” one says. Another asks, “Did Goldman” — as in Goldman Sachs — do that?”  But at the genteel and very Southern Palmetto, the only other trustees turn out to be Kincaid’s trophy wife, JoJo, and daughter, Claire. This gives Grove a swing vote. That will be important once he figures out how risky the Palmetto Foundation’s activities really are. “Five to 10,” he says to JoJo at one point. “Percent?” she asks. “Years,” he says.  Mr. Vonnegut further revs up “The Trust” by going beyond Palmetto’s questionable business dealings. He also throws in a Catholic charity that turns out to be financing an adult porn superstore in Fayetteville, N.C. The angry burghers of the local community near the store are represented by Biscuit Hughes, a tubby lawyer who is as much fun as his name.  Biscuit, who will eventually join forces with Grove, tries to track down the store’s owners. He does it with the white-collar cleverness that is Mr. Vonnegut’s specialty. Going straight for the owners will get him nowhere. And Biscuit knows it. So he ferrets out the C.P.A.’s who filed each investor’s Form 990 (“Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax”) with the I.R.S. The accountant for something called the Catholic Fund is particularly blunt when it comes to his client’s connection to a porn retailer. He asks if Biscuit wants to buy the business. “Everything is on the table,” the laughably pious accountant says, “when children’s lives are at stake.”  There’s enough novelty to this plot to set “The Trust” apart from garden-variety business thrillers, the ones in which Bernard Madoff stand-ins run Ponzi schemes. Anyway, Mr. Vonnegut is just getting started. Soon Grove is dealing with a priest of the Maryknoll order who makes big-money deals with Palmetto for the sake of maimed Filipino orphans — or so he says. But the Manila Society for Children at Risk turns out to be one more part of a complex and devious shell game.  One of the book’s neatest tricks is Grove’s way of using an analytics Web site, to see how much online traffic the dubious-sounding charities attract. When he finds out that the charities aren’t popular enough to account for the sums being donated, he knows that he’s digging in the right direction.
In âThe Trust,â Norb Vonnegut brings back his Wall Street stockbroker hero to uncover another diabolically elegant business crime.