Free to Trade

✍ Scribed by Ridpath, Michael

• Book ID: 109236033
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 193 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0434001708

✦ Synopsis

Ridpath's first novel is a junk bond of a financial thriller, flashy but insubstantial. Trouble comes to narrator Paul Murray, rising bond trader at a small London firm, when one of his colleagues drowns in the Thames. The cops think accident or suicide, but Paul thinks murder, having seen the dead woman's brutal ex-lover molest her just before her death. So Paul starts sleuthing, pursuing leads in London, Manhattan and Arizona and tying the killing into a grand fraud involving a top New York trading firm. At the center of the fraud lurks an icy villain whose manipulations get Paul fired and placed under suspicion of insider trading-and murder. The villain isn't the brutal ex-lover, though, whose main purpose here is to perform gratuitous acts of violence that stick out from the main story like pickles on pudding; instead, the villain is, despite Ridpath's efforts to confound, exactly whom most readers will suspect halfway into the tale-which also suffers from leaden dialogue and myriad coincidences. Ridpath paces matters briskly, conveys the cutthroat ambience of the markets and, along the way, provides a solid seminar in venture capitalism. But anyone interested more in good fiction than high finance will find this offering a bad bargain.