Finance thriller a sound investment

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/12/2014 (4333 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In The Prince of Risk (Anchor, 541 pages, $12), by California’s Christopher Reich, hedge-fund manager Bobby Astor is shocked to find out that his father, an executive at the New York Stock Exchange, has died in an attack in his vehicle en route to a meeting with the president of the United Sates. Determined to learn the meaning of a text his father sent him moments before his death, Bobby uncovers a conspiracy that aims to bring down the U.S. financial system.

Reich, who was a banker before his first novel, Numbered Account, turned him into a bestselling novelist, has a knack for making complicated things, such as the intricacies of global finance, not only understandable but downright compelling. His characters are well-designed (they feel like real people), and his stories are believable and exciting. If you’re a thriller fan, and you haven’t yet met Reich, now’s a good time.

***

New Mexico’s John Sandford is another novelist who tells good stories about real people. Storm Front (Berkley, 404 pages, $12), the seventh Virgil Flowers mystery, finds the Minnesota cop teamed up with an Israeli investigator who’s trying to track down the man who stole a valuable archaeological artifact. Flowers thinks this is a straightforward missing-persons case with some international flavour thrown in to make it interesting, but he has no idea what he’s in store for.

Sandford is doing something pretty interesting here: he’s taking what could be one of those labyrinthine ancient-mystery thrillers (it has all the elements, including a dark secret that could destroy Christianity) and treating it like a cop novel. Virgil’s a pragmatist, a down-to-earth guy, not given to wild speculation or flights of fantasy, and it’s interesting to see this sort of story told through his eyes. One of the best in the Flowers series.

***

In a post-apocalyptic North America, airship captain Ben Gold is helping a team of scientists find a cure for the plague that turned most of humanity into brutal, animalistic creatures known as Ferals. When his airship is stolen, Ben faces a tough choice: go after the thieves, or stay with the scientists.

As it turns out, he has to do both, if he (and perhaps the remainder of the human race) is going to survive.

Falling Sky (Pyr, 254 pages, $18), by Rajan Khanna, is a fast-paced, highly imaginative novel. The author, who lives in New York City, has created a fascinating world in which most of what’s left of humanity lives in the air, in floating cities, protected — or so they hope — from the plague that’s still ravaging the planet. Fans of near-future, post-apocalyptic fiction should enjoy this very much.

***

From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network (Berkley, 496 pages, $19), by New York journalist Allen Salkin, tells the behind-the-scenes story of the network that was launched in the early 1990s as a way for some cable TV execs to make an easy profit and wound up making superstars out of Emeril Legasse, Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis, Guy Fieri and others.

This is a lively book about the business of television, very much in the vein of Bill Carter’s classic The Late Shift or Brian Stelter’s more recent Top of the Morning — it’s as much about the people as it is about the business. Salkin takes us behind closed doors (the people involved might have wished some of them had remained closed), lets us get a good look at the people — stars, producers, creators — who turned what was supposed to be a niche network into a mainstream success. If you like books about television, you won’t want to miss this one.

 

Halifax, N.S., freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month.