Accidental Oligarch, The

**The author is donating all proceeds from this book to Internews to help Ukrainian journalists** Ukraine is the "new Berlin," the front line of Russian American confrontation. It's a place of intrigue, corruption, political blackmail and, yes, romance. The Accidental Oligarch reveals how Ukraine's fate is intimately entangled with our own. After Yuri Yavlinsky is laid off from his job shoveling shit at the Kyiv Zoo, he is promptly arrested for failing to pay a $30 million tax bill. Yuri's ID had been used to create several offshore shell companies to hide the assets of the oligarch who is the principal backer of Ukraine's president. Dora Osatinskaya, the Ukrainian lawyer who heads an anti-corruption organization, persuades Yuri to retrieve the mogul's bank records used for money laundering. But Yuri doesn't stop there. Infuriated by the corruption that is sucking the life out of his country, he uses his wits and street smarts to hijack the companies and their billion dollars in assets. It takes an oligarch to fight an oligarch. The novel climaxes during the 2014 Euromaidan "Revolution of Dignity," where Yuri and his band of savvy saboteurs fight oligarchs, the government, a cabal of mobsters and moguls, and stealth Russian forces, as they strive to save themselves and the battered country they believe in.