The lives of the main characters in this book swirl around a remote hotel near Vancouver.  This hotel is the hub in which their lives briefly intersect, and then they scatter--mostly.  Vincent, a confusing name for a woman, and Paul are half-siblings, and Paul has landed at the hotel as an escape from a death for which he was an unwitting catalyst.  Vincent, the bartender, catches the eye of wealthy Jonathan and becomes his arm-candy but never officially his wife.  This oversight may be a good thing, as Vincent is running a huge Ponzi scheme, à la Bernie Madoff.  Leon becomes one of Jonathan’s unfortunate investors and eventually investigates Vincent’s disappearance, which the opening of the book mentions somewhat nebulously.  I enjoyed this book immensely, although corruption and lack of conscience are the main themes, and I would have liked some of the characters to have shown at least a hint of a moral compass.  Also, the chapters surrounding the crumbling of Jonathan’s pyramid are written in first-person plural, presumably by one or more members of his spineless and greedy staff, and struck me as either a knockoff or an homage to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End about a corporate layoff.  Despite this quirk, their various reactions to the authorities’ discovery of their fraud are priceless.  They all knew they were committing a crime and fleecing their clients but basically did nothing to prepare for the inevitable collapse.  I couldn’t decide if they were in complete denial or were just deer in the headlights.  Simone, the receptionist, is completely in the dark until she has to buy four shredders.  Jonathan’s daughter tells Simone that she will escape the scandal with a good cocktail party story, and I love how that prediction comes to fruition.