Catherine Raynes: Five and Rule of Lies

Five by Ilona Bannister  

Five passengers. Five minutes until the next train... five minutes until someone dies. Someone will die here this morning, at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 7:06 to London Victoria arrives.  

On a train platform, five strangers unknowingly face a chilling countdown: one of them will die in five minutes. In this gripping tale narrated with a sharp tongue, the five main characters - a child, a mother, a businessman, an old woman, and a gambler - will draw you in with their stories of fate, sacrifice, and the relationships we build and those we break.  

As the clock ticks down, we look away from the demonic child Gideon. We judge his mother Emma who must surely be to blame. We are curiously compelled by the successful yet damaged businessman Liam. We pity the furious old Mrs Worth who grew up in a macabre household and failed at being a mother. And we fall in love with the beautiful Sonny who is on the verge of gambling his life away. 

Rule of Lies by Jamison R. Firestone  

Raised by his father, a multimillionaire conman and crack addict who owned Manhattan’s most expensive brothel, twenty-four-year-old Jamison R. Firestone decided to change the channel. He graduated from law school in 1991 and sought his fortune in Gorbachev’s USSR, establishing Russia’s first independent foreign law firm. 

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Jamison lived in the maelstrom that was Russia, defending himself and his clients from mafia attacks, dealing with corrupt police officers, having his law office raided by armed commandos, and once having to bug the offices of the Russian police. 

Jamison was at the centre of some of Russia’s most important events. He employed Sergei Magnitsky who was murdered for uncovering the largest tax theft in Russian history and teamed up with Bill Browder and Alexei Navalny to expose his killers. Along the way he inadvertently taught Navalny to make videos exposing corruption and started a war with the Russian government over passage of the Magnitsky Acts which threatened to sanction Russia’s most powerful people. 

A real-life story that reads like a spy novel, Rule of Lies goes deep inside contemporary Russia and events that have reshaped the globe. Darkly comic, sometimes horrifying and deeply moving, it is a chilling warning of what can happen when a nascent democracy succumbs to one man’s corrupt iron rule, becoming not only an authoritarian nation but a profoundly criminal one—a true mafia state. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from news Talks at b.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Catherine Rains is our book reviewer on Saturday mornings every week.
Of course, she brings us a couple of recommendations and
she's here with us. Now get a.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Catherine, Good morning Jack.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
So two books for us this morning. Let's begin with
five by Alona Banister.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
So this is a really character centric novel and it
deals with some quite heavy themes of grief and addiction
and abuse and motherhood. And the narrator of the book, though,
is unseen, and it is discussing the events with you
the reader, and sort of telling you the parts of
the story, and you're the five characters are at a
train platform and unwittingly facing the clock because one of

(00:49):
them will die in the next five minutes. And so
there's five characters, a child, a mother, a businesswoman, an
old woman, and a gambler. And Emma the mother is
completely unlikeable. Her son Gabrielle, although he's only six, is
not the most pleasant of children. And missus Worth is
the elderly lady and she has she lacks tech and
empathy and she's completely devoid of people in her life,

(01:12):
and Sonny's mother has always made excuses for him, and
he's now thirty two thousand dollars in gambling debts. And
Liam is a businessman who's this huge ego and a
man who's never wrong. And so the narrator delves deep
into these characters. So it's not a thriller with lots
of twists and turns, but this really psychological book, so
you as a reader have to work out what's happening
and why it's going to happen, and encourages really to

(01:34):
reach your own conclusions about all of these characters and
actually how quickly we judge others without any empathy of
their lives. So it's a very interesting perspective of a
psychological thriller.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Okay, cool, that's five sounds really interesting. Up Rule of
Lies by Jamison Firestone. Tell me that's that's not there
well known of.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
It, to be honest, I'm not completely sure. Wow, it
does feel very made.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
It does feel very made.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
But the story, which is a true story, reads really
like a spy novel, so his name probably goes along
well with it. And you go deep inside a Russia
and the way it's reshoped the Globe, and the author
himself actually flees Russia in two thousand and eight and
leaves behind a legal business that he's built since arriving
in at the age of twenty four and nineteen ninety one.
But his backstory of however ended up there is really interesting.

(02:27):
He grew up in this huge Beverly Hills mansion, lived
a life of privilege, and then out of nowhere, the
family sells the house and heads to New York to
Forest Hills, and six people end up living in this
two bedroom department. His parents' marriage breaks down, and then
his father reveals to the kids that he's been involved
in some somewhat shady business deals involving these non existent

(02:49):
coal mines that are now being investigated. So Jamison in
his formative years deals with some pretty interesting and unsavory characters,
and despite this, he goes on to qualify as a
lawyer and also ends up studying Russian and then he
heads to Russia and starts his own law firm. He's
there for some very interesting parts of history. Coup attempts

(03:09):
the rule of law, how fragile it is, the freedoms
that people initially enjoyed, and then the sort of emergence
of gangsters running protection rackets and Putin and the good
times and how life very much changes. But a lot
of the book focuses on his firm former colleague, a
guy called Sergeim Mensi Magnitsky.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yes, this is Jamison Firestone.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
This is his name.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yes, sorry, okay.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
So he's a lawyer who uncovers this massive theft of
Russian taxpayer money, and instead of being lauded by the state,
he's arrested, thrown into jail, no medical care, He's beaten mercilessly,
and he eventually dies from his injuries, and then after
his death the state prosecute him for stealing and for
his own injuries and actually accused him of stealing the

(03:58):
money himself. And it's just this very fascinating insight into
Russia and that political corruption and Putin and his cronies
and olia Goax and their unrestrained lifestyle and the murders
of distance at home and abroad. I could not put
this down. There was another guy that's involved in this
who wrote a similar book about this, a guy called
Bill Bowden. And this.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Show yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And this is this.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Is the kind of other not the other side of
the story, but another kind of main character in the
story and telling what went on, and it is just fascinating.
I don't think I can get enough of kind of
what sort of happened in the how it all works.
And yeah, just it's the corruption is unpresient.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, it's astonishing. Oh how good? Yeah, I know I
would love to read this. I love Bill Brayder's book.
And yeah, because they had the Magnitsky Act was the
one they managed to get past in the US afterwards, Yes, yes, yeah, okay.
And so jameson Firestone is indeed his name, hell of
a name. So Rule of Lies by Jameson Firestone is

(04:59):
Catherine's second pick. Five by Alona Banister was her first
pick for US this week, and both of those books
will be up on the News Tour Z'B website. Have
a great weekend, Catherine, and we will catch you again
next week.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks ed B from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.