Money To Burn

Twenty-nine-year-old Michael Cantella is a rising star at Saxton Silvers, a high-level investment banking firm on Wall Street. His life is going according to plan until the love of his life, Ivy Layton, disappears one night on their Bahamas sailing vacation turned impromptu honeymoon, and is never found.

Fast forward seven years later, it's the eve of Michael's thirty-fifth birthday, and he is still right on track: successful career, a beautiful new wife named Mallory, and most importantly, money. Reveling in his good fortune, Michael logs into his computer, enters his password, and pulls up his biggest investment account: zero balance. He tries another, and another. All of them, zero. Then the ding of a new email: "Just as Planned. Xo xo."

With these three words Michael's life as he knows it is liquidated along with his bank account. Saxton Silvers has to bail out two of the firm's hedge funds on the brink of bankruptcy from subprime losses, and financial media reports leak that Michael is responsible for Saxton Silver's financial ruin--betting against his own company to the tune of a $4.5 million profit overnight, and more in the long run.

Michael is left alone, framed, with no one to trust: Mallory wants a divorce, his personal net worth is gone, and his firm--worth $850 billion a week ago--is now on the brink of bankruptcy. With undercover FBI agents afoot, spyware on his computer, and mysterious emails from a "JBU," Michael finds himself embroiled in corporate espionage, trying to face the fact that several signs point to Ivy as a key player. But what if Ivy has come back from the dead, only to visit on Michael a fate worse than death?

With echoes of THE FIRM, Grippando's newest thriller takes readers to Wall Street, illustrating the very real dangers of what Warren Buffett coined, "financial weapons of mass destruction."