Free to Trade: A Novel of Suspense
Michael Ridpath. HarperCollins Publishers, $23 (346pp) ISBN 978-0-06-017630-3
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. 100,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; audio rights to HarperAudio; author tour. (Jan.)
Details
Reviewed on: 01/02/1995
Genre: Fiction
Analog Audio Cassette - 978-0-7451-6528-8
Compact Disc - 978-1-4450-8121-2
MP3 CD - 978-1-4450-8122-9
Mass Market Paperbound - 978-0-06-109348-7
Paperback - 338 pages - 978-1-5309-1292-6