A Financial Thriller That is Eerily Prescient
Darrell Delamaide is a veteran Washington DC-based financial news reporter and author of several books, including two novels. After reading his historical thriller The Grand Mirage a few months ago, I placed Mr. Delamaide on my watch list of favorite authors. Lo and behold, Gold comes out. The funny thing about Gold is that it was originally published over two decades ago, yet it reads as relevant in today's news cycle of non-stop financial scandals as it did when it was published. I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it. Following is my review --
"Voodoo financial trading. Speculative chicanery with no perpetrators caught redhanded. Skullduggery in the corporate boardrooms. A globalized system of omnipotent banks too big to fail. Cunning nation-state players whose financial machinations resemble more a poker game at a Vegas casino than sound business practice. Sound familiar? No, these aren’t ripped from today’s headlines. They come from an eerily prescient and well-paced financial thriller written over twenty years ago and recently republished: Darrell Delamaide’s Gold. Add to the story a body count that includes a Swiss commodity trader and a British news editor, and nations’ economies on the brink. Include an intrepid news reporter determined, at risk of his life, to get to the bottom of a huge financial conspiracy and you have the makings of an edge-of-the-seat thriller that the New York Daily News called “an entertaining cautionary tale about greed.”
I read Gold into the wee hours of the night, unable to put it down. “Disorderly market conditions” was their quiet term for the mayhem in the foreign exchange markets that accompanied these billion-dollar waves of speculation,” it says in the first chapter. I felt that I was reading the latest sophistry in today’s Wall Street Journal explaining away yet more opaque money sorcery pulled off by yet another under-regulated mega-bank. Gold is crisply written, featuring believable and sympathetic protagonists and takes the reader through the complex channels of international financial dealings without overwhelming or confusing the reader. Few financial thrillers actually get the mechanics right. Mr. Delamaide, as a career financial news reporter, gets it right. Gold is well worth grabbing for that long flight, that rainy weekend indoors, that vacation beach. But if after reading it you sell all of your investments in a panic, don’t blame Mr. Delamaide. Blame the markets!"