THE WHEAT KILLING

by Peter & Paul Rubinstein Tanous ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1979

When commodities broker Jack Donaldson suspects that Russia is going to have a disastrous wheat-crop year (despite Russian claims of just the opposite), he advises his newest, comeliest client--Mountain Breeze of the Native American Investment Company--to buy, buy, buy wheat futures. This she does, not just because of Jack's advice, but because she herself has gathered evidence of the Soviet wheat-blight calamity while touring Russia with her concert-pianist fianc‚ And indeed, the Russians are in a bad way:in fact, to meet their wheat needs they're counting on arranging to buy U.S. wheat cheap. But Jack and Mountain Breeze are too smart for them, not only buying up all the wheat in sight but wheeling and dealing to keep the market price phenomenally high. And even after they're set up to make billions of bucks, Mountain Breeze refuses to bail the Russians out by selling some wheat--even though the world economy is in chaos, even though the State Department is bogging and threatening--because of a dear friend whom the Russians have been torturing. Like Tanous-and-Rubinstein's The Petro-Dollar Takeover (1975), this is an elaborate fancy for finance fanciers only--since the characters are paper-thin, the Mountain Breeze/Jack romance is pallid, and the authors don't even have enough basic craftsmanship to solve the problems of using a first-person narrator (Jack) to tell a multi-plotted story.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION