Andrew Gross: Everything To Lose

A mixed up thriller
The main theme of this book is "that every life is the story of a single mistake, and then what happens after." Hilary is driving behind a car where the driver gets spooked by a deer in his headlights and plunges off the road down a steep embankment. By the time Hilary staggers down the embankment the elderly man is dead. But it was the satchel on the passenger seat that was the mistake - it contained $500,000. On seeing the contents Hilary throws the satchel into the bushes......

Hilary agonises over the satchel - she is in desperate financial circumstances after a marriage breakdown without financial support, a pending mortgage default and huge school bills to educate her severely autistic child. Eventually she succumbs to temptation and retrieves the satchel. Of course that amount of cash couldn't come from honest sources. Other people want to find the money and they leave violent trail behind them in their search.

I have enjoyed Gross's Ty Hauck series but found this standalone thriller to be pretty ordinary without any great character development. The book read like the author had a number of plot ideas, mixed them up together and they came out the end in a bit of a mangled mess.

Andrew Gross: Reckless

GFC Conspiracy
I like financial thrillers and this one by Andrew Gross is one of the best I have read based on the events of the recent Global Financial Crisis. Gross uses his knowledge of the background to the GFC to craft a conspiracy thriller suggesting that it may have been partly manipulated by outside forces.

Ty Hauck is a former NYPD detective who is now a private security consultant to a big financial institution, but despite the greater income benefits he is not comfortable with his new role. In the midst of the GFC a key market operator, Marc Glasman, his wife April and most of his family are killed during in a midnight home invasion. Hauck gets drawn into the case because during a traumatic time in his past he had become very close to April and he makes a promise to himself that he will discover the truth behind the tragedy.

The killings become financially important when it is discovered that Glasman has billions of dollars in outstanding trades that could bring down one of the biggest Wall Street businesses. Then another Wall Street trader who appears to have committed suicide is also found to have billions of bad outstanding trades.

Hauck's soon realises that he is looking at murders arranged by powerful forces. He joins forces with Naomi Blum, a beautiful and ambitious US Treasury investigator as they track down the people behind this major financial conspiracy.

Andrew Grosss is a top-notch thriller writer who has written a page-turning and mostly plausible financial thriller that goes behind the scenes of the worst financial disaster in recent times. I will certainly look out for other books in his Ty Hauck series.