Top Producer by Norb Vonnegut is a well written, interesting business thriller, and about three quarters of his readers on Amazon agree with me.

Vonnegut employs the first-person point of view, as well as the financial jargon of a professional, to convincingly put the reader in the shoes of a successful stockbroker in Midtown Manhattan. Grove O’Rourke, Southern-born and Harvard-educated, works for an investment bank, a place where “the elite go to get ideas and leave their money.” He handles approximately two billion dollars, and being a “top producer,” consistently delivers good returns.

Vonnegut’s first-person writing paints a vivid picture of O’Rourke’s pressure cooker of a life. In addition to acquiring and retaining clients, investing their assets, and “holding their hands,” he must cope with constant backbiting, manipulation, and game playing by colleagues and competitors who connive to steal his business.

The conceit of the novel is as follows: Grove’s closest friend, universally liked Charlie Keleman, is a flamboyant, free-spending manager of a boutique bank that invests in “funds of funds.” Charlie organizes a birthday party for his wife Samantha at an aquarium. During the belly dancer’s routine, and with five hundred guests looking on, someone pushes Charlie into the fish tank, where he is eaten by the resident sharks. Shortly after the tragedy, Samantha contacts Grove and informs him that she needs his help to locate Charlie’s money—she was not involved in the business; she has no idea where he parked their personal or business assets; and she has only $600 in her bank account.

So, the reader is now confronted with two questions:

1. Who threw Charlie into the tank and why?
2. Where is the money?

Grove insists on lending Samantha $75,000 to help her through the crisis, an action that will ultimately make him a “person of interest” when the detectives start their investigation. And he agrees to help her extricate herself from the financial morass. Vonnegut follows Grove as he attempts to unwind the two mysteries, cope with the detectives assigned to the case, and face both the revealed and unrevealed villains who are determined to keep the mysteries unsolved—all while attempting to preserve his lucrative investment practice and fight off his so-called colleagues who are “smelling blood in the water.”

The novel has two weaknesses, one minor, and one major.

1. Vonnegut introduces some over-the-top minor characters who come across as almost cartoonish. Also, Grove’s occasional aphorisms spoken to the reader (Woody Allen–like) periodically interrupt the fictive dream.
2. In light of his education and experience, Grove’s willingness to assume the dual roles of forensic accountant and private detective to solve the twin mysteries, while trying to preserve his businesses and not run afoul of the law, requires a whopping dose of suspension of disbelief.

Nevertheless, the novel’s strengths more than make up for its weaknesses:

1. 1. In Grove O’Rouke, Vonnegut has created a strong character who is truly a nice guy. His efforts to help Charlie’s wife resolve the mess that she is in, while often amateurish, are laudable. It is easy for the reader to identify with and root for him.
   2. A reader who is motivated to learn something about the nuts and bolts of high finance and security trading will be amply rewarded.

Louis Auchincloss, who died in 2010, was one of America’s most prolific authors. Over his fifty-year career, he wrote 60 books, including 31 novels, several biographies, short story collections, works of literary criticism, and more. During most of his writing career he was employed full-time as an estate attorney.

The subject matter for his fiction oeuvre was derived from what he called “the comfortable world” — which when he was growing up in the 1920s and ‘30s meant an apartment or brownstone in town, a house in the country, a staff of five or six maids, two or three cars, several club memberships, a private school education for one’s children. His work was frequently compared with Edith Wharton’s, whose characters, settings, and plots originated in what was then called the world of “bluebloods,” or in today’s parlance, the “one-percenters.”

It is therefore somewhat prescient that Auchincloss’s 1966 novel, The Embezzler, addressed an issue that would both dominate the headlines and affect a substantial portion of society 42 years later—namely flagrant malfeasance of highly placed and trusted members of the financial elite.

Auchincloss was inspired by the documented facts of the 1938 Wall Street fraud case involving Richard Whitney that led the United States government to take control of the stock market. Whitney, who had been president of the New York Stock Exchange for many years, was arrested for pledging collateral that he didn’t own for a loan that he was not able to repay. He was such a prominent figure in the financial world that when an aide told then-president Franklin Roosevelt that Whitney was arrested, he was purported to have been astonished and exclaimed, “Not Dick Whitney. Not Dick Whitney.”

The Embezzler uses three conflicting narrative voices and conflicting viewpoints to tell the story of the rise and fall of Wall Street legend Guy Prime, who, like Richard Whitney, was born into wealth, attended the best schools, and achieved financial positions of power and authority, on the assumption that his character was impeccable. The three narrative voices are those of Guy Prime, his best friend, Rex Greer, and his wife, Angelica, who following Guy’s arrest, divorces Guy and marries Rex, with whom she previously had an affair.

The conceit of the novel arises from the fact that after serving his five-year prison sentence, Guy Prime moves to Panama, marries, and spends the rest of his life having lunch, drinking, and reflecting on the how and why of his fall from grace. He decides to write his story so that his daughter—who has completely cut off communication from him and his grandchildren, hear his side of the story. He insists that he never intended to commit a crime, but made some unfortunate decisions, misjudged certain people, and was the victim of circumstances that were entirely beyond his control. Upon his death, the manuscript is sent to his wife who reads it and shares it with Rex. They decide that Guy’s version of the events cannot be the last word and each embarks on writing their own version of the events that led to Guy’s downfall.

Auchincloss’s clever use of an unreliable narrator (ala the Japanese classic film, Rashomon, or Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw) is to reveal Guy, Rex, and Angelica to all be untrustworthy. This technique provides a source for the ambiguity that substantially adds to the novel’s interest and keeps the reader turning pages.

One of the strongest features of The Embezzler is that it gives the reader an excellent insight into the thought processes, risky decisions, self-justifications, and often-magical thinking of a powerful financial executive when his carefully orchestrated schemes start falling apart, losing respectability, and going bankrupt. In short, it’s a story about disgrace.

By reading The Embezzler you will develop new insight into scandals that are frequently reported in the financial press. (One Amazon reviewer noted that as he read the novel he imagined that he was in Bernie Madoff’s head.) I strongly recommend the novel.