My cousin Lisa just sent me this book and it flew through it. It's sort of a historical, financial, thriller of a murder mystery set in 18th century London with a Jewish subplot, if you can believe that.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is that the main character and his family are all from Portugal, therefore Sephardic Jews. In the story, it's the Sephardic Jewry who are ascendendant while the Tudesco Jews, or Askenazhim, are the downtrodden emigrees from Eastern Europe.

It's interesting how things have turned around. These days, generally speaking the Askenazi jews pretty much run everything (in Israel, I mean), while the Sephardim are marginalized.

Here's the blurb from author David Liss's website:

Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: A Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London’s gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.

In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver becomes entangled with a crime of the most personal sort, involving the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stock-jobber. To find the answers he seeks, Weaver must contend with a garrulous prostitute who knows too much about his past, estranged relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have disguised their business dealings with an intricate web of deception and violence.

Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation – a way of life that poses great risks for investors, but real dangers for Weaver and his family.

In case you didn't know here's a brief description of the differences between Askenazic and Sephardic Jews that I cribbed from a jewish website:

After the Destruction of the First Temple, around 450 BCE, the Jews were exiled to Babylon (modern day Iraq). After the 70-year exile many returned.

Differences in custom developed over many years; some had their origin in halachic disputes among the Rabbis of the various communities, and some in outside cultural influences.