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Amazon.com Review

Like many American fathers, Jimmy Lee Hancock likes to get nice things for his kids. Teddy, his eldest son, got the CEO slot at Warfield Capital, the Hancock's multibillion dollar hedge fund. Bo, the black sheep trading genius who actually runs Warfield, got the title of chief operating officer. And if good-looking Paul's a really good boy, he can trade in that musty old Connecticut governorship for a shiny, new U.S. presidency.

But first things first. Things like removing the hard-drinking, carousing, possibly womanizing, PR-nightmare-in-the-making Bo to a family compound in Montana and replacing him with duplicitous trading whiz Frank Ramsey. And with Bo tucked away from the prying eyes of the press, Jimmy Lee can ice Paul's presidential cake by cooking his primary opponent's political goose with career-destroying evidence. The evidence, offered for sale by a deeply covered government cabal with an eye towards global domination, is Jimmy Lee's for a mere $2 billion.

Meanwhile, literally back at the ranch, Bo gets word from a trusted Warfield insider that Ramsey's up to no fiscal good. Then Jimmy Lee suffers a heart attack and the loose-lipped Warfield snitch wakes up dead. As Bo returns to Manhattan to see Jimmy Lee, reclaim his rightful place, and rid the shop of rats, bodies drop like autumn leaves and the plot, Yogi Berra-like, comes to frequent and ever-more sinister forks in the road and gleefully takes them all.

And very effectively, too. Frey's no world-class writer. His characters tend to be as one-dimensional as their dialogue is wooden, but readers who notice likely won't care a whit. As a world-class financier (formerly in mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan, now with a private equity firm), Frey knows the ins and outs of very high finance and has an historical and bestselling knack (see The Insider, The Legacy, The Inner Sanctum, etc.) for weaving that knowledge into intricate, gripping, and bankable plots. Trust Fund's among them. --Michael Hudson

From Publishers Weekly

Family political aspirations lead to corporate collusion with a rogue cadre of U.S. congressional and intelligence agents bent on co-opting the resources of the Internet and the military industrial complex in this high-octane conspiracy thriller. Jimmy Lee Hancock, the Joe Kennedyesque patriarchal head of a massive family-owned hedge fund, Warfield Capital, secretly approves the diversion of $2 billion to the cadre in exchange for evidence smearing his son Paul's presidential primary opponents. Youngest son Bo has brilliantly maneuvered Warfield Capital to the top of the Wall Street heap, but eldest son Teddy gets all the credit. When Bo makes millions for the firm on the gold market, he and his wife, Meg, find themselves inexplicably exiled to Montana by Jimmy Lee, ostensibly because Bo's drinking and potential womanizing might ruffle Paul's campaign. Frank Ramsey, a man Bo distrusts, replaces Bo as COO, becoming the first family outsider to wield company power. When a Warfield exec dies soon after alerting Bo to a shady money deal, and Hancock senior has a heart attack, Bo races back to Manhattan just in time to be told a devastating family secret. A showdown with Ramsey sparks a hardball attack by the secret cadre, and the bodies start piling up as Bo battles enemies inside and outside the family. Bo's ultimate weapon is his knowledge of finance, and real-life financier Frey (The Insider, etc.) cleverly incorporates the workings of Wall Street, global economics and the wired world into his melodramatic plot. The reader always learns something new about finance from Frey's suspenseful outings. (Jan 2.) Forecast: Any novel by the author of The Insider is going to get attention (a sample chapter of Trust Fund will be included in the mass market edition of The Insider, also due out in January), and bookstore and author media appearances in D.C. and New York will give this title an extra boost. This book should chart well.
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