THE INSIDERS

Debut British paperback entitled No Tears: Tales from the Square Mile, now renamed and seen here in hardcover, contains a portfolio of stories set against the world of London high finance.

These brief, pointed stories nearly all turn on deception. The first, “Diary,” tells of a marketing director (MD), an incipient alcoholic whose marriage looks clearly out of hand. In “Dinner Party,” Richard is invited to a dinner given by his ex-girlfriend and attacked by the guests for his downsizing of various companies; he turns the tables, but not endearingly to the reader. In “Team Move,” a female MD tries to hijack her team and sell it, along with herself, to a rival firm—but all is not as she hopes. “Infatuation” plays out in e-mails across an open office space between another MD, 15 years older than the young woman being seduced; it blooms with dizzy love until the O. Henry ending when we discover a disconcerting fact about the MD. “Smart People” tells of an interview at Barton’s (a firm that often pops up in these stories): three young candidates await their interview, one of them intimidating the other two. When the intimidator is called in first for the interview, he learns something he can’t pass onto the other two without deceiving them about it. Several of these tales would make good opening chapters for a novel, which is what readers will find themselves hungering for as the stories suck them into varied climates and machinations of high finance. “Takeover,” for instance, tells in sweeping gestures of a German company taking over a British company, calling a meeting of the directors of the Investment Banking Department, and letting them face the inquisitorial representative of the German company, who is intent on firing the whole bunch. So it goes when playing the game of lawsuits, mergers, and getting the inside track.

Well told but let’s hope it’s just a warm-up for the big business novel Charters clearly has in him.