Lee Boynton, a Washington, D.C., journalist, and financial sleuth Thurlow Cooke unearth a world-wide, billion-dollar money-laundering scheme whose operators may be responsible for the mysterious death of a government official. Reprint. PW.
After a career as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a partner at Lehman Brothers and an independent financial consultant and investor, I sat down in 1978 to write my first novel. The book, Green Monday, published in 1980, was a success, and I became a full-time writer. Since then I have published seven other novels, written innumerable articles and reviews, and beginning in 1987, a weekly column for The New York Observer. I also contribute occasional commentary to Forbes.com.
I like to write novels that I would enjoy reading - for I was a voracious reader long before I took up the typewriter and then the computer keyboard.To me, reading enjoyment derives from both the intelligence and the heart. I've often said I read nonfiction for information, but novels for truth, by which I mean insight and understanding. Plots must make narrative sense; the reader must say to himself or herself from the first page, "Yes, this could happen!" And, indeed, much of what I've set down in my novels has in fact subsequently come to pass.My characters take a view of life, which they both shape and are shaped by. They have opinions, and sometimes what they have to say has such a ring of authenticity that readers can get upset. Still, the criticism I am most proud of appeared just last Suday, July 19, in The New York Post, in a review of my latest novel, Love & Money (Melville House), by Kyle Smith, who opened his review with the statement, "Smart people need beach reads too." There's my ideal reader: who wants both enlightenment and entertainment in the same package, and is scared of neither.
