Worth Reading

Reuters reports steady and increasing sales of books about finance, cookbooks, and mysteries and thrillers, as people struggle with money issues, make more meals at home, and seek an escape from difficult times. Among the titles mentioned are the new authorized biography of Warren Buffet, The Snowball, Stop the 401(k) Rip-off!: Eliminate Costly Hidden Fees to Improve Your Life by David B. Loeper, and The 99 Cent Only Stores Cookbook: Gourmet Recipes at Discount Prices by Christiane Jory. There’s also “increased interest in upcoming big fall new releases from (Food Network’s) Ina Garten and Martha Stewart, whose new books are about getting back to basics.”

If you’re looking for financial fiction or thrillers, you might try one of these:

Po Bronson: Bombardiers (1996)
A black comedy about a group of money-crazed and eccentric bond traders in San Francisco. (Bronson is a former banker.)

Michael Culp: Conflicted: A Novel (2003)
Culp drew on decades of experience as a top analyst and Director of Research at PaineWebber and Prudential Securities for this suspenseful novel that lets readers live inside a Wall Street Research Department for 14 turbulent months.

Linda Davies: Nest of Vipers (1994)
A currency trader in London, undercover for the Governor of the Bank of London to document corruption and fraud that goes beyond merchant banking, uncovers an international insider trading ring involving high-ranking officials and controlled by the Mafia. (Davies was an investment banker on Wall Street, in Eastern Europe and in the City of London.)

Paul Erdman: The Set-Up (1997)
Thriller. Imprisoned unexpectedly by the Swiss police, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board Charlie Black and his wife agree to take part in an elaborate escape scheme.  The volatile derivative market, secret Swiss bank accounts, Eurobond futures are all part of the mix. (Erdman was a Canadian-born banker who was jailed in Switzerland in the early 1970s for his part in an illegal scheme to corner the world cocoa market.)

Paul Erdman: Zero Coupon (1993)
Set against the background of international high finance (European banking centers to Wall Street), financier Willy Saxon and his socialite accomplice enter the world of futures and options.

Stephen W. Frey: The Takeover (1995)
Debut novel about a secret society of powerful businessmen who attempt to engineer a large-scale economic disaster to topple the President. (Frey was an executive banker and worked in J. P. Morgan’s mergers and acquisitions dept.)

Stephen W. Frey: The Power Broker: A Novel (2006)
Christian Gillette, chairman of the largest private equity fund in the country, is opening a new casino and launching an NFL franchise, and he may be the running mate of a dynamic U.S. senator who’s likely to be the country’s first black president. But the chairman of U.S. Oil wants Gillette to join a shadow organization, the Order, which has manipulated financial and historical events in the country since 1839.  (Third in this series; followed by The Successor: A Novel, 2007)

Emma Lathen’s mystery series featuring urbane Wall Street banker John Putnam Thatcher. The first one, Banking on Death, was published in 1961; the 24th and last is A Shark Out of Water (1997).  Lathen is dubbed the ‘Wall Street Agatha Christie.’ Her books are a blend of social satire and international detection. (Lathen is the pen name for two American authors: Mary Jane Latsis, who died in 1997, and Martha Henissart)

James Patterson: Black Market (1986)
Thriller. Bitter Vietnam POWs who have decided to destroy the world’s financial system, while also extorting money to reward fellow POWs for their unappreciated service to their country.

Stephen Rhodes: Velocity of Money: A Novel of Wall Street (1999)
Novel involving a scheme to drive down stock market prices by using automated trading programs that target derivatives with the intention of producing the a huge stock market crash. (Rhodes — actually a pseudonym for Keith Styrcula — worked at Warburg Dillon Reed in derivatives.)

Victor Sperandeo and Alvaro Almeida: Cra$hmaker: A Federal Affaire: A Novel (2000)
A novel about a plot to cause the crash of the Federal Reserve System, so that Congress would then abolish both the Federal Reserve and income tax and introduce other free-market reforms. (Sperandeo is a Wall Street Trader, Almeida is a pen name for an attorney.)

Michael Thomas: Black Money (1994)
High-tech financial thriller. When a government investigator who’s cleaning up the Savings and Loan failures of the 1980s comes across a bank account that should not exist, a U.S. money-laundering scheme of grand proportions begins to unravel. (Thomas is a former Wall Street investment banker.)