From Publishers Weekly
Morris's first thriller is a brisk, if at times predictable, story of international financial mayhem. The unlikely heroes are Oliver Dawson, an obdurate low-level attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission's Enforcement Division, and Peter Neil, a young man thrust into an atmosphere of greed and temptation at a hedge fund. After Peter's mother dies in a car accident, her former lover and family friend, attorney Jason Ayers, offers the unemployed Peter a job with one of his clients, a hedge fund called Stenman Partners. The company is an epicenter of corruption-reaping money from the drug trade, among other things-but Peter gets swept up in the fast money and glamour. Morris paints a detailed picture of currency trading and the movements of billions of dollars around the world, spelling out the dire consequences for barely solvent developing nations. There are consequences as well for the poor working saps who threaten to reveal Stenman Partners' unscrupulous activities: they end up dead, frustrating Oliver's investigation of the company. For Peter, the good times come to an end when the mysterious circumstances of his mother's death turn out to be linked to Stenman. Before she died, she left Peter documents that incriminated the hedge fund, and now top malefactors at Stenman are framing him for murder. Peter teams up with Oliver and Ayers's daughter, Kate, in a dangerous scheme to unveil the company's doings. Though Peter's rise and fall and resurrection are boilerplate, the fast-moving action and high-stakes financial intrigue should keep thriller fans entertained.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In 1992, the author, a successful stock trader, left Wall Street for California, where he devoted much of his time to writing. His first novel suggests that his literary talent may be as finely honed as his business skills. This financial thriller (naturally) begins with a mass homicide--and unintended suicide--at a San Diego securities office, then skips forward several days. Peter Neil, whose mother passed away a week earlier, has quit his high-paying job "pushing overpriced mortgage loans on unsuspecting clients." Now, with no income and plenty of debts, he's offered a job by Jason Ayers, a financier whose relationship with Peter's mother was closer then it ought to have been. But Peter soon begins to suspect the job offer may not have been purely altruistic and that the massacre at the San Diego securities company may be a lot nearer to home than he'd imagined. This is a crisply written, well-developed, and suspenseful tale of greed and deception. Recommend it with confidence to fans of financial thrillers. _David Pitt_
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