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FAST MONEY MOVES by Richard W Seeks

FAST MONEY MOVES

by Richard W Seeks

Pub Date: Nov. 26th, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490547251
Publisher: CreateSpace

In Seeks’ debut thriller, a corporation’s chief financial officer disappears on the eve of a major acquisition, and the ensuing search reveals a conspiracy that grows increasingly complex.

While diving in Mexico, Drew Conner, the CFO of TomCon, is shot and left for dead at the bottom of the ocean. Missing along with Conner is the $75 million allocated for the purchase of biochemical company BioCat. The FBI and Conner’s fellow executives immediately assume that Conner has stolen the money and faked his disappearance to escape prosecution; in reality, Conner is struggling to make it back to the United States to prove his innocence. Pursued both by federal agents and his would-be assassins, Conner is aided by his former girlfriend (and now FBI agent) Tony Rainer, insurance investigator Shannon McGuire, and Marcos, the fisherman who rescues him from the ocean. Among the gunfights and near-death escapes, a rather complex plot unfolds, one that forces Drew to question who wanted him dead and if someone from his own company might have been part of the plan. His investigation points not only to Petersen Industries, a rival company, but also to a Mexican drug lord and a mysterious formula hidden in BioCat’s files. The plot borders on being convoluted, with multiple double crosses and twists yet very few genuine surprises along the way. Seeks' efficient writing moves the story along but is unlikely to provide much fodder for the imagination; similarly, it struggles to build much suspense as the story approaches its climax. Characters are rarely more than simple archetypes—e.g., gruff, wisecracking McGuire or humble Marcos—and do little beyond serve the plot. Still, Seeks commands a decent knowledge of the financial world in which the story is set, and he’s able to provide realistic detail of the financial machinations that drive the story without distracting from it. But the narrative often strays into moralizing on the greed of corporate finance—“Certainly there were no tears on Wall Street where emotion is measured in hard numbers only”—which offers little thematic significance and doesn’t quite mesh with the tone of the novel.

A complicated but ultimately thin thriller that trades only in stock conventions.