The news from Wall Street has been a little too thrilling of late, but the high stakes world of high finance has provided a natural backdrop for some great fiction over the years. How do I balance my own need for a little respite from the increasingly bleak economic outlook with my creeping concern that I don’t understand nearly enough about the stock market’s ins and outs? Like many readers, I turn to stories that allow me to escape into a fictional world, and yet pick up some interesting tidbits about the real world of Wall Street along the way. Many of the books that follow are written by ex-brokers and traders, all of whom are, we may presume, currently at work now on their big bailout thrillers.
- Wall Street Noir, Peter Spiegelman, ed.
I read or skim through many of Akashic’s regional noir anthologies looking for stories for the library’s Thrilling Tales Adult Storytime, and I’m pretty sure I’ll include a few from this one, as timely as it is. Here are great crime stories by a range of leading hardboiled writers such as Peter Blauner, John Burdett, Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr. Noir fiction is all about human vice, and this collection rings all the variations on greed, with plenty of wrath, envy and lust stirred in to spice the stew. (By the way, Seattle Noir is due out next year).
- Restitution, by Lee Vance
The tables are suddenly turned on cutthroat Wall Street fat cat Peter Tyler when his wife is murdered and he’s in the frame. Vance was a partner at Goldman Sachs, and sprinkles interesting details about global finance in amongst the twists and turns of this excellent thriller.
- The Street, by Lee Gruenfeld
Artemis-5.com is booming, and making money hand over fist as investment capitalists all buy in to the next big thing, but just how much can brilliant company founder James Hanley make before the sham startup’s complete lack of staff, goals, or a product bring the whole thing crashing down. Hanley plays cat and mouse with wily SEC enforcement officer Jubal Thurgren, and bullets fly when the bubble bursts, in a satiric thriller that shows just how far into the red rampant speculation can go. For another view of the flawed American character on display during the 90s dot-com boom in the mode of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, try Phillip Allen’s Play Money.
- Up, Down and Sideways, by Robert Patton.
Here’s a sardonic morality tale in which Wall Street wunderkind Philip Halsey’s makes a killing in the go-go 80’s, having sold a soul he really may never have had in the first place, but perhaps can find, if 
the fates cooperate.
- Moral Hazard, by Kate Jennings
Cath is unsure which is worse: her husband’s gradual descent into Alzheimer’s, or her own journey into the ethical wilderness of Wall Street as she works as a spin doctor to pay the medical bills.
- All I Could Get, by Scott Lasser
Too much is never enough, but will this lesson save everyman Barry Schwartz, a bond trader whose grab for the brass ring sends him careening off the carousel.
- Das Kapital: A Novel of love and money markets, by Viken Berberian
Just what is the relationship of money, love, and evil? That questions is asked, if not answered, by this highly original, offbeat satire about a hedge fund runner who enters into a curious partnership with a would-be terrorist to corner the global currency markets.
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