Customer Reviews

Trading Reality: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found Trading Reality to be very exciting and entertaining - from beginning to end. The plot is great and it's difficult to guess what's going to happen next. You constantly think you've worked it out only to realise that you've been had once again. I found the detailed descriptions of life in The City combined with the interesting world of high technology to be an excellent cocktail. Well written and definitely worth a try...

I like his writing very much, easy to read, and keeps you wanting to turn the pages, However, I did find this book a bit predictable. All the leads are laid into the book in a far to obvious way.

This book can be described as a modern whodunit murder mystery with thriller and technological elements thrown into the plot line. The brother of a bond trader in London is murdered and the bond trader turns into CEO and entrepreneur when he takes over his brother's company. The company was on the verge of a technological breakthrough in Virtual Reality and this technology plays a major role as the story unfolds. Suspense mounts towards the end as the protagonist has to deal with managing the company, keeping it afloat and learning about the technology, while he also tries to discover who murdered his brother at the same time. His life is not made any easier by attempts at hostile take-overs, attempts on his life and terrorism. To top it all, he also falls in love with one of his new employees! The author brings the book to a masterful conclusion when all the suspects are gathered in one location, as in true classical whodunit fashion, and the technology is employed to force the murderer to expose him/herself. The story flows well and the book is very difficult to put down.

A very good read: well crafted and combines interesting insights into the worlds of both technology and finance.

This is my third try at reading a financial thriller, and so far I'm not impressed. Something about the blandness of the financial world goes badly with conventional, creaky thriller plots maybe. This is less financial than FREE TO TRADE and a lot better than the dreadful efforts of Mr Frey, but it still badly lacks an edge, or a sense of attack. It laps up the world of high finance with breathless enthusiasm (all those HUGE sums of money being moved around - how thrilling! Or is it?). The result is pretty flat and dull.

The book really keeps you up all night. It has less brokering stuff then "Free to Trade" what makes it even more interesting. Ridpath manages to combine the two areas of brokering and virtual reality but keeps it near real life. The classic ending of an english criminal story of gathering all suspects in one room to make the murderer reveale himself, is varied in a fascinating way.

This is my first Michael Ridpath book and I have become a true fan. I am not much for thrillers but this was different because I believed the characters. They were authentic people with normal interests that were drawn into a mystery, as was I. I hate stories where characters appear only to create the mystery and have no believeable purpose otherwise. I grew to care about each character, to dislike some, and feel a genuin sense of loss when one was killed. I almost hated to go about my life because I would prefer to stay remain absorbed in this world. It ended too soon, and I already miss them.

I am now looking through Mr. Ridpath's body of work for a sequal or at least another appearance of Paul, Cathy, and Cash.

Not only is this book very long and very boring, it also frequently goes into great detail about the extremely dull world of high finance.

Mark Fairfax goes through a transformation, from Stockbroker in London to Stockbroker in Scotland. Does that sounds like a transformation to you? Me neither.

It's just too bad that his brother has to die and his girlfriend is the one who kills him. For good measure, the author tosses in a chain-smoking, heavy drinking work-a-holic to replace his homicidal girlfriend. Yippee, a match made in Heaven!

But the author is determined to continue to wreck even more havoc on his own creation by creating suspense, then immediately destroying it while trying to drag it out. All the while I'm crying out, "But you already killed the suspense 100's of pages ago!"

And that's what Ridpath does throughout the book. It's like someone who gives the punchline before a joke that is extremely unfunny to begin with, and then expects people to laugh.

A true thriller. Micheal Ridpath's excellent thriller "Trading Reality" keeps you on the edge of your reading chair, the bookmark will be permanentley out, if you like commercial fiction, you'll love Trading Reality

Trading Reality combines three of my lifes loves - commodity trading, computer reality, and a great murder mystery. Tautly written, and played out until the final page, the reader will find this work hard to put away. I look forward to Ridpath's next effort.