A potentially ruined Wall Street executive takes a life-changing trip in this debut novel.

Julian Maslow has just been accused of embezzling over $6 million. He’s been suspended from the global investment firm at which he serves as operations manager, and he must now await the results of an investigation by Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Frank Favara. The lawyer has already decided that Julian is guilty: Julian “had a month to protect himself from being tried for manipulating his position in a major bank’s operations to funnel money offshore to the Cayman Islands…If convicted, he would be put away for a reasonably uncomfortable amount of time and more than likely lose his income and family.” An amateur pilot, Julian jumps at the chance to fly his friend Gary Becker, head of CFK’s Prime Brokerage, to a golf outing in South Carolina. Gary is meeting a frustrated client there. If Gary can manage to convince him to stay, it will likely mean a major promotion. Julian is only going to distract himself from his potential downfall. Honestly, it’s the first vacation he’s had time to take in years. The trip becomes an aerial odyssey across the Southeast and as far afield as St. Thomas, taking Julian and Gary in and out of trouble while they question the motivations that drew them from humble origins to Wall Street in the first place. Along the way, there are steak dinners, desirable women, a night in the drunk tank, and an angry man with a gun. Did Julian steal the money? He tells everyone he didn’t, obviously, but can he be believed? As Julian soon finds out, his innocence—and guilt—isn’t quite as simple as whether or not Favara uncovers some wrongdoing, and at some point, he will need to come back down to earth.

Chesterton’s prose is sharp and evocative, particularly the dialogue, which captures the jocular, rapid-fire delivery that readers associate with Wall Street. Unfortunately, the descriptions are often overwritten, as here where Julian interacts with his alluring secretary: “Julian watched as her bright smile, usually a fixture on her face, slowly diminished as her eyebrows dove down, and she shot a glance over to him, and he knew who it was on the other end of the line. Her intuitive eyes furled, and a hint of red on her pearl-white cheeks revealed her dismay at what she was hearing.” The book is a midlife-crisis road novel that explores the hollowness of a career on Wall Street, and it has its moments of humor and circumspection. The use of the private plane is an inspired choice, both because of the elite access it provides the characters and because of the twist it brings to the traditional road trip. Even so, the tale generally suffers from simplistic and unsympathetic characters operating in an otherwise recognizable universe. Julian isn’t really likable or interesting enough to carry the plot, which eventually travels to some pretty dark places in order to redeem him. The story moves well and roams widely, but it never really finds an emotional spot to land.

An intriguing vacation tale saddled with a lackluster protagonist.