Recovering from near financial ruin, he embarks on a coffee trading scheme with a Dutch woman, kept secret because it is forbidden by his community council.

Miguel navigates the social structures of the Amsterdam business world, the politics of the council, and the plots of competitors bringing this new import to Europe.

[2] This novel is set about 60 years earlier, but is not a prequel; as stated by Liss, Miguel Lienzo is a very different kind of character from the English great-nephew whom he would never meet.

The book has been published in translation into Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish.

Miguel gets Geertruid to front the money for the initial purchases, and he arranges for most of the foreign trades, ordering 90 barrels of coffee through an Amsterdam broker named Isaiah Nunes.

His long-time enemy Solomon Parido approaches him with overtures of friendship and an offer to connect Miguel with a buyer for the brandy futures.

Despite the "careful attention" to setting, Mallon wished for a bit more "time and place" as a break from the rapid and intricate plot.

[1] Writing in the Jewish Quarterly Review, Adam Sutcliffe identified The Coffee Trader as among "the underinvestigated emerging genre of the 'port Jew novel,'" citing as other examples In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh, The Nature of Blood by Caryl Phillips, and The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie.

[7]: 384–385  New York Times reviewer Thomas Mallon writes that the Amsterdam of the novel is "a kind of information age, where wealth follows from what one knows or can trick others into believing.

"[5]: 425  Sutcliffe concludes, "The commercial, cultural, and political modernity of this Amsterdam milieu underpins the familiar fascination of The Coffee Trader.