Customer Reviews

Green Monday

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It was Michael Thomas who made me an unabashed admirer of Financial Thrillers. This book of his , is a nail biting, super exciting thriller, not only an extra ordinary story beautifully told, but also an education for common folks who dont know the intrigues and manipulations of financial markets, stock markets and corporate warfare big games that happen all the time out there in the market place. Green Monday is a book not to be missed.

Seldom do I save novels into my permanent library. This is one that I have. Superb writing coupled with a far-out yet viable financial-manipulation plot line makes this one worth re-reading every few years. Big money, romance, dangerous characters, this book has it all.

Over twenty years from its publishing, Green Monday still holds its own as possibly the best financial thriller existent. Makes me wish he wrote more or the genre had caught fire like legal thrillers. The book is a throwback to a politically incorrect time when the U.S. was mired in stagflation and the NYSE was a shell of itself.

This is really excellent book, and even more timely now than when it was written.

Anyone who read Richard Clarke's "Cyberwar" or my book, "Nerds on Wall Street" knows that automation has made markets more vulnerable.

Odd things happen in markets, and this is should be on the shelf of anyone who wants to understand why. And, hey, it costs a penny!

Someone recommended this as a taut financial thriller. Well at over 500 pages it's NOT taut! I realize people reading financial thrillers envy their protagonists (the "wannabe" effect), but the portrayal of the protagonist here is annoyingly silly and shallow: keeps gloating about his Ivy education, berating everyone else, travelling the world etc etc etc.

As a result the FEW chunks of financial and political plot (the dynamics of distressed debt default in syndicated loans, elasticity of oil with other markets, the details of algorithmic trading by what is known today as VWAP, TWAP etc.) are watered down with too much annoying, long winded, completely inconsequential tripe pertaining to the "high culture" of the protagonist. You get the idea. Bleah. The tripe to plot ratio in this book is over 60%. This book could be a "good" 200 page read. Instead we are treated to the author's diarrhea.