When attorney Rick Hansen lands a plum job at the blue-chip global investment firm of Wolcott, Fulbright & Company, he thinks he has it made - until he realizes that his predecessor's suicide was probably murder. Intrigued by the death, Hansen soon uncovers his colleague's involvement in one of the biggest swindles in history. A cabal of extremely wealthy financiers known as The Contrarians has concocted a disastrous plan to precipitate the biggest crash since October 1929. And they're going to make billions of dollars doing it. As Black Friday of the 1990s approaches, time is running out for Hansen to stop the market from crashing - and to save his own life.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
An inquisitive young lawyer is all that threatens the success of a plot to precipitate a capital-markets meltdown that will yield its villainous instigators a megabuck return: an impressive first novel by the pseudonymous Rhodes. Soon after joining Wolcott Fulbright, a Manhattan-based investment firm with world-class credentials, attorney Rick Hansen becomes curious about the apparent suicide of his predecessor, Thomas Bingham. He soon determines that the dead man was probably murdered and steps up the pace of his unofficial investigation. Rick's inquiries quickly bring him to the attention of the nine- member cabal that retains an inside man at Wolcott and had recruited Bingham as a go-between in a scheme to drive stock prices down by as much as 50 percent, using automated trading programs that target derivatives (risky hedging instruments whose values derive from other securities or commodities). Under the manic direction of an evil genius variously known as Philip Colbert or Charles Stone, the high-tech conspirators (who call themselves the Contrarians) engineer a one-session drop of seven percent in the Dow Jones, a test run Wall Streeters dub ``Freefall Friday.'' While preparing for their climactic payday, the intriguers also keep tabs on Rick, who's coming ever closer to unraveling the masterplan. Indeed, the amateur sleuth visits a supercomputer center outside Pittsburgh, where he joins forces with Freddie Zaraghi, a savvy young hacker well versed in chaos theory and market crashes. With Freddie in tow, Rick returns to New York to mount an 11th-hour defense against the doomsday assault the Contrarians have unleashed on the world's financial capitals. A blue-chip debut thriller that brings new resonance to the old saw of getting killed in the market. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
While pseudonymous financial-industry attorney/author Rhodes loads his impressive first novel with the requisite thriller elements--expensive cigars, a mole, a respectable body count, and ex-KGB thugs, bugs, and wiretaps--it's the crisp dialogue, vivid description, and complex financial and technological jargon that make this novel a smart, challenging, and at times even educational read. -- Entertainment Weekly
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Really Fine Read!!!,
By Faustus98@aol.com (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Velocity of Money: A Novel of Wall Street (Hardcover)
If you like Wall Street and financial intrigue, you will love this book. The real beauty of it, however, is that you don't need to be a stock broker or lawyer to follow the story. Thrills galore!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended for all Wall Streeters,
By
This review is from: The Velocity of Money: A Novel of Wall Street (Mass Market Paperback)
The villain is modeled on Marc Rich; coincidentally I read it and started corresponding with the author just a week before Clinton pardoned Rich. A great anthropological study of the trading subsculture at the end of the 20th century. Very good, and especially great if you're an in-house counsel at a major house who works with derivatives.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It couldn't be this easy--could it?,
By wristshot "wristshot" (Boston) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Velocity of Money: A Novel of Wall Street (Hardcover)
This book is enough to make even the most risk-taking, microcap, emerging-markets, junk-debt investor stuff his cash under the mattress. An all-too-plausible scheme to crash the market by program-trading and then collecting the proceeds with a massive option bet. The story is propelled by the usual cloke-and-dagger, regular-guy-hero-smells-a-rat narrative. But it moves along briskly and never gets sufficiently stupid to distract you from the financial machinations that are the guts of the plot. Significantly more intelligent than the average thriller.
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