My Wall Street Thriller
By Joe Kolman
NAKED OPTION, my first novel, is about a disgraced options trader who tracks a multi-million fraud and a murder through Wall Street’s gay subculture.
I wrote it because I couldn’t find many novels that fit the reality that I saw as a financial journalist. Most of the characters in the Wall Street thriller genre are one-dimensional portraits of greed. There’s certainly plenty of greed on Wall Street, but it’s only one of many powerful emotions — and not necessarily even the dominant one.
I tried to make the plot as exciting as I could – without bending reality. Dave Ackerman, the narrator of NAKED OPTION, is a brilliant young trader, but one day, recklessly trying to one-up his firm’s superstar, he goes naked on an option trade — and loses $112 million in two hours. His career is over. Then he hears about an auditing job at an investment bank. He knows within minutes that something is very wrong, but he’s so desperate he takes the job.
His new partner is Susanna Cassuto, an attractive young auditor he tags as a rich party girl. (Boy was he wrong!) Together they uncover an elegant embezzlement scheme. When somebody turns up dead, they race to put the pieces together, but the bank drops the case. They’re fired. Furious, Dave goes out on his own to find the killer.
In many respects, it’s a portrait of what happened to Wall Street directly after 9/11, when the markets were in tatters, and everybody was on edge. It also chronicles the homophobic investment bank trading floor culture of that era. Racism wasn’t condoned, but sexism and homophobia was rampant. If you were gay, you usually kept it a secret.
There’s plenty of sex in the book, but it’s quite unconventional. Most of the sex you read in fiction is inevitably the kind where everything works smoothly. But sometimes things just don’t click. And dating itself is filled with mystery. You’re always asking: Who is this person? What am I going to uncover as I get closer to them? So book is really a double mystery, an erotic mystery, because Dave’s first impression of Susanna is completely off-base.
The book was published in the UK September by Harriman House, a large UK independent publisher, and will be available for sale in the US in late October.
In COVERED OPTION, the sequel, the protagonist goes undercover at a hedge fund to stop a terrorist plot to disrupt the New York Stock Exchange.
You can read an excerpt of the first 30 pages on my web site: www.nakedoption.com
Hope you enjoy it!
