Crypto Crooks, is the fourth book in Stina Hemming’s legal thriller series, featuring Alex Greene as a high-flying American securities lawyer-turned investigator. While investigating a suspicious cryptocurrency exchange based in Croatia, Alex runs across the name of a dead man from one of her earlier files, and is intrigued. The dead man is a Boston-based lawyer, Nick Martin. Nick was the legal mastermind behind a life settlement fund where insureds had died in highly suspicious circumstances.* The life settlement fund was closely aligned with the Russian Mafia and the Kremlin and when Nick disappeared after a multibillion-dollar IPO fell apart, he was thought to have been assassinated by the vengeful Russians. Her main client Basel Re had underwritten a large life insurance policy on Nick, who left behind a wife and two daughters, and had long since paid out on the policy.
Alex reports her findings to Basel Re and is told to drop the investigation as the limitation period has expired on the payment of the insurance policy. Alex is determined to get to the bottom of it. She discovers that Nick is alive and well and working for the Russians again, this time it’s a Russian-backed crypto exchange.
Undaunted, Alex flies to Dubrovnik to confront Nick, who folds after she threatens to provide his family with his contact information and report him to Interpol. But what Nick tells her, baffles even Alex. Nick has partnered up with a prominent international law firm, Heath LLP and one of its junior lawyers, Bonita Babic, to facilitate the bribery of officials high in the American government through an unregulated crypto exchange headquartered in Dubrovnik. The conspiracy behind the crypto platform was decades in the making with deep roots between the Kremlin and the First Family involving a Russian power play in Western Europe. Just as shocking is the personal participation of the First Lady in the development and operation of the crypto exchange and her hold over Babic and Babic’s parents.
On Greene’s advice, Babic turns whistle blower; she is fired and receives threats against herself and her parents. Babic turns to Alex for help with a multibillion-dollar Bitcoin offer that Alex cannot refuse. Faced with the misappropriation of billions of dollars of Bitcoin from two of the most powerful forces in the world, Alex must decide whether to expose the conspiracy involving the Kremlin and the White House putting her own life at risk. Matters are further complicated when 16-year-old Hannah, Alex’s impulsive ward, decides to take matters in her own hands and steals the USB port and disappears. The outcome impacts both the White House and the future of the American democracy.
Stina Hemming is a pseudonym for a securities lawyer whose Alex Greene stories feature murder, mayhem and international intrigue in the treacherous American financial markets, focusing on Ponzi schemes, organized crime, inept regulators and billion-dollar frauds. Drawing from decades of experience through the most major stock crises of our generation, her fictional stories focus the role of lawyers in facilitating and papering those scams.
* As related in the first Alex Greene adventure, Death Fund, by ©Stina Hemming 2025.