CLAIRE CONSIDERS The Final Account by Jeff Cooper

“The Final Account,” by Jeff Cooper Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro

The unraveling of a long-term embezzlement conspiracy starts with a purloined watch while a new widow with dementia listens to the thieves from a nearby room. Attorney Tom Nelson, long trapped into the ongoing scheme by his gambling addiction, tries to talk Kyle Stone, a Connecticut state police officer and general henchman, out of taking the heirloom watch from Tom’s client, a multi-millionaire who just died. Why take a watch worth only thousands when many millions of dollars are in play? Because Kyle, a man who believes he is entitled to far more than he is getting in the continuing conspiracy, simply wants the watch.

So begins “The Final Account” (Red Adept Publishing 2025), by Jeff Cooper, an attorney and law professor. Cooper first fascinated his readers with the award-winning “After the Fact” (2021), a legal thriller with more than a twist or two. Now Cooper is back with “The Final Account,” which seamlessly blends legal thriller and political thriller into an engrossing, well-plotted novel.

Jack Collins, the protagonist in “After the Fact” reappears in “The Final Account,” this time with his own newly created law firm in Greenwich, Connecticut. Jack enjoys a happy family life with wife Amanda and son, with another baby on the way. Yet, Jack has many problems—their unborn baby might have serious issues, they need a bigger house they might not be able to afford, and the law firm teeters on the financial edge. When Jack brings in an older, well-established partner, Tom Nelson, he believes Nelson will be a rainmaker for the firm and bring with him some of Greenwich’s rich and elite. The problem with this plan is that Nelson is embezzling from the multi-million-dollar estate of a recently deceased client. Not a couple of thousand here or there, but millions. And not just from that one estate but from other estates spanning many years.

Jack Collins, who forms a tender part of the story with his beloved wife Amanda and their growing family, is a man with much to lose. Of course, his primary priorities are to both protect and provide for his family. And then there is his fledgling law firm, which struggles to avoid the red ink of insolvency. With family, career, and finances on the line, the safest thing for Jack Collins to do when he learns of the watch stolen from Tom’s client’s estate is to walk away. But Jack isn’t that kind of guy—he can’t just overlook the missing watch. Especially when the widow summons him to her memory care facility to express her outrage that Tom and some man she later identifies as Kyle took the watch, a treasured family heirloom that she wants for her son.

In tackling the issue of the watch with the help of his firm’s legal assistant, Jack discovers the estate is missing more than just a watch. The discrepancies equal millions. And the conspiracy neither begins nor ends with Tom. The fraud goes even higher up, soon pulling Jack into a political vortex that puts his family and his firm in the crosshairs.

Just as Jeff Cooper did with his debut novel, the author leads his readers through a tense, action-packed story with scheming, manipulative bad guys and stressed but earnest good guys facing off in dangerous, no-mercy conflicts. Tom is more nuanced than the other co-conspirators and is a seemingly good guy with a bad habit—his gambling. His co-conspirators are the really bad guys who remain ruthless to the core. Their fragile bonds are sex, greed, and ambition, but these bonds could well break under pressure.

It's a riveting ride protagonist Jack Collins takes in “The Final Account” and author Jeff Cooper knows how to build the suspense into ever tenser momentum, crafting a classic page-turner, edge of you seat kind of book. Not only does author Cooper merge legal thriller and political thriller genres to great effect, but he also blends the inverted detective story format with the more utilized who-done-it format. That is, the author lets the readers learn early on that Tom and Kyle are embezzling and that Kyle steals the heirloom watch, just as the inverted detective format lets readers know who the villains are at the onset. But Cooper holds back who the true operatives are in the spiraling conspiracy, reserving more of the who-what-why until revealed mid-stream in the novel. Yet still, like the inverted detective format, readers know more than Collins. The story evolves into a chase to the wire as to whether Jack Collins can find the truth and live to see justice—or whether he and his beloved family will be more casualties in the ambitious schemes of some of Connecticut’s most powerful figures.

Not only does Cooper successfully blend genre and formats, but he excels in the use of the old Chekhov's gun narrative principle, in which if a gun appears early in the book, readers should expect it to be fired at some point. Thus, the watch which appears in the first chapter later becomes instrumental in the plot. But the watch isn’t the only object used consistent with the Chekhov’s gun narrative principle, so readers, be alert. Cooper is not just a grand storyteller, he is an author who knows well how to use the mechanics of genre and technique to create compelling, readable, awesome novels.

Jeff Cooper, a New York native who now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, is a law professor, lawyer, former Presidential candidate, and published author of both fiction and nonfiction. A graduate of Harvard College, Yale Law School and New York University School of Law, he spent much of his career working in the law firms and trust banks fictionalized in his novels.