Sunday, March 11, 2012

Clawback -- Mike Cooper

Mike Cooper is the pen name of Shamus winner Mike Wiecek. In his new disguise he's written Clawback, a financial thriller in which someone's killing hedge fund managers. Not just any hedge fund managers, though. The ones being singled out are the very worst ones, meaning the ones who've managed to lose the most money for their clients. The narrator of the story calls himself Silas Cade, a former black ops guy who now collects "clawback" from hedge fund managers.

Clawback is defined as "the mandatory return of compensation paid on a deal that later goes bad." Sometimes people don't want to pay. Cade sees to it that they do. When one of them dies, he's hired to find out who's doing the killing.

It's not an easy job, but it has its compensations, as Cade meets a beautiful blogger who's just as savvy as he is. On the other hand it leads to lots of other deaths, not to mention a series of action scenes that are clearly aimed at the big-screen.

Cade's breezy narration carries everything a long at a brisk pace, and we meet a number of interesting and entertaining minor characters (not all of whom survive) along the way. There's a ton of insider info about the world of high finance and the difficulty of living off the grid, too. Entertaining all the way. Check it out.

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