FLASH CRASH

In Hatch’s debut novel, a Wall Street worker becomes the victim of an extortion scheme that ultimately forces him to confront his past.

David Belov is a quantitative programmer at Wall Street investment bank Montgomery Noyes. After his wife and young, diabetic son are kidnapped, David is forced to insert a special program into his company’s servers that will trigger a worldwide gold panic. In the wake of that incident, police find David’s family. However, police detective Jake Rivett, who cuts a bold figure riding from crime scene to crime scene on his Ducati, suspects David of helping to mastermind the gold crash scheme. Unable to convince Jake that he’s an innocent victim, David escapes from police custody and tries to clear his name. For help, he turns to his old friend Russian mobster Vlad Zhadanov. Along the way, David and Jake both stumble across an incredible financial conspiracy, and David and Vlad plan to pull off the most audacious heist in Wall Street history. A series of plot twists follows as the true shape of the conspiracy becomes clear to David, who’s forced to re-evaluate his shared past with Vlad. Hatch portrays David as a resourceful hero who rises to the occasion when things go against him. The story builds up to a lengthy heist sequence that’s a bit over the top but exciting to read nonetheless. The book gives almost equal weight to David’s back story, making this caper novel into something of a bildungsroman. But what truly elevates the tale is the author’s insider’s view of Wall Street traders and how they think and talk, with dialogue as entertainingly raunchy as that in The Wolf of Wall Street or the Showtime TV series Billions.

A thriller that’s a little too convoluted for its own good but succeeds at updating the Masters of the Universe mindset to the present.