In the private equity world of Stephen Frey's newest thriller, bullets are flying faster than buyout bids.
Schmooze institutional investors, harangue drag-butt executives, negotiate megabuck deals. These are the things that fill the lives of most private equity types, but not Christian Gillette's. Gillette, the new head of elite Everest Capital, spends time dodging assassins.
In Stephen Frey's new novel, The Chairman (Ballantine Books, $21.95), poor Gillette--well, not poor in the bank account sense--finds almost everybody is out to get him. His least rabid enemies merely wish to see him canned. Others want to see him dead. At his boss' funeral, somebody blows up Gillette's limo before he can get into it. Then a wildly shooting gunman traps him in a gas station restroom. Later, cruising in his Lincoln Town Car on Park Avenue, Gillette almost takes another bullet. If he's not careful, he'll end up like his boss, whose drowning wasn't an, er, accident.
The reason these antagonists want Gillette dispatched: lust for his power and treasure. As Everest's chairman, he controls 27 companies and is in the same league as Henry Kravis and Thomas Lee. In Mel Brooks' immortal words, "It's good to be the king." Part of the fun in this book is that a paranoiac existence doesn't stop Gillette from enjoying the fine life of a financier, surrounded by sumptuous luxury, brown-nosing dignitaries and libidinous women. Too bad one of these ladies comes after him with a knife.
The Chairman, Frey's tenth novel, is his best. As always, he provides twists galore, great action and crisp dialogue. But what he excels at is enriching his stories with financial lore. The most enticingsuspense tales give readers insights into a high-stakes profession, whether it's defense lawyer (John Grisham), forensic pathologist (Patricia Cornwell) or homicide detective (Michael Connelly). Financial thrillers, however, haven't enjoyed the popularity of legal, medical or cop novels. Too few writers can accurately convey the drama of markets. Who could make buying an oil company fascinating?
Frey can. With his lively writing and cynical humor, this author, a partner in a private equity firm, is a captivat-ing tour guide to a Wall Street wonderland of greed, folly and deceit whose rules seem lifted from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. Here's how Frey defines "price": "Everyone has one; you just have to find it. Then be willing to pay it." We learn that you negotiate an acquisition by pretending not to want the prize very much. If selling a company, never open the bidding, as that reveals your cards. And should your high-risk deals all blow up, Frey tells us, you and your partners must "scatter for places where English is rarely spoken."
He archly conveys the addictive appeal of the dealster world by making the following observation about a suc-cessful player who, when he hits 40, decides to quit the game to spend more time with the family: "After about three months, you find they aren't really that interesting. Or, worse, they don't find you very interesting."
Gillette is Frey's first continuing hero (we're told on the dust jacket), meaning he'll be the central figure in fu-ture outings. Yet aside from his athletic abilities and financial acumen, Gillette has little in common with past protago-nists. These typically have been scrappy working class strivers pitted against the snooty Ivy Leaguers peopling the in-vestment world.
Gillette, brought up with money, is a bit of a snob himself. Right after his ascension to chairman, he haughtily corrects a friend who calls him "Chris": "Ben, from now on, call me Christian." A master manipulator who views truth as a commodity to be rationed, Gillette does one charitable deed: He moves an impoverished Latino family out of the slums and into a McMansion. But it later turns out that he exacts a price:He uses the family as his private goon squad to rough up his foes.
Why should we root for such an unsporting fellow? Because in the end he does well by the few good folks left. And because, like Ian Fleming's antihero, James Bond (the mean-spirited book version, not the amusing movie one), Gillette engages us with his enviable panache and awesome courage. Gillette's hobby is to visit pool halls solo in dan-gerous neighborhoods and, with no cash in his pocket, challenge desperados to big-dollar games. He wins every time.
—Larry Light
… if you have a grudge against Wall Street, you could find yourself smiling contentedly as all those financial wizards so deservedly bite the dust.
— The Washington Post
Diminished by dull prose, but distinguished by colorful, well-drawn characters and an arresting, labyrinthine plot, this 10th novel by Frey (after Silent Partner) illuminates the machinations of big business and high finance. Frey introduces Christian Gillette, who will be a continuing character in this inaugural volume of a projected series. As 36-year-old Gillette walks out of a Park Avenue church after delivering the eulogy following the suspicious accidental drowning of the late chairman of Everest Capital, he is nearly killed when a firebomb obliterates his waiting limo. Undaunted, newly elected chairman Gillette steps into another car and carries on with his planning: he's determined to make the company's new equity fund, Everest Eight, the biggest in the history of private equity and to eliminate his competition within the firm. Corporate chicanery, boardroom sex and backstabbing abound, and conspiracies proliferate, as Gillette enters into a deal with the chief of a mega-insurance company to increase Everest Eight's capital to $15 billion in a bold attempt to surpass rival Paul Strazzi at Apex Equity and become the nation's dominant private equity firm. Sadly, a perfunctory denouement does no justice to the clever plot. Agent, Cynthia Manson. (Mar. 29) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Yet another threatened CEO-this time young Christian Gillette, who gets his first hint of trouble when his car erupts in flames. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Whatcha gonna do when you come out of church, having just eulogized your late boss at his funeral, and your limousine blows up in your face? And it's only page three of a novel you're Chairman of? Well, what you'll know is that you're being kicked about as hero of a Frey (Shadow Account, 2003) megabillions-melodrama spilling with slimy financial hocus-pocus. But how can a thriller find climactic TNT for its plot if it sets off dynamite in Scene One? Christian Gillette-36 and greedier than Wall Street's Gordon Gekko-has just replaced murdered Bill Donovan as chairman of the gigantic private equity company Everest Capital. That's Everest, as in highest mountain, which Everest plans to become the equivalent of in confidential high-risk capital investment. For readers, icy Gillette is a tough sell. Bill Donovan used to log in 80-hour weeks with no vacations, and now even Gillette's two girlfriends of the past ten years drop him for lack of quality companionship time. The plot turns on the fact that three other top men in Everest-Ben Cohen, Troy Mason and Nigel Faraday-might have been voted in as chairman, and one may have turned dirty. Still, we might find Donovan's widow, with her fabulous inheritance, available for top slot as villain. Could she-or someone-be making a deal with the rival Strazzi company? But Troy Mason's clean-because Gillette fires him on the spot when he sees him having carnal relations with Kathy Hays in the cellar during the funeral reception at Donovan's house. Everest owns its private surveillance and security company, McGuire and Company, which may have become greedy itself. And what of the Canadian oil reserves that Everest dickers over? Is that deal going south?Hey, even Gillette's not bulletproof. It may not be TNT, but Frey does provide a spectacular twist at the end. Between murderous power shifts, the novel's repeated operative phrase is How does it work?-followed by endless financial analyis and talk, talk, talk.. . .
PRAISE FOR STEPHEN FREY
The Chairman
“A great read all the way. Wall Street’s dark side is brilliantly portrayed by Stephen Frey. This is a high-stakes power play at its most ferocious level. Read it!”
–DONALD J. TRUMP
Shadow Account
“Action-packed . . . Bookkeeping chicanery, insider trading, and other big-business conspiracies abound.”
–The Wall Street Journal
“This is the sort of fiction that skates dangerously close to truth.”
–Los Angeles Times
“Deft suspense . . . wickedly good.”
–Forbes
Silent Partner
“Fast-moving, zestful, stirring . . . full of twists and surprises . . . compelling characters.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Danger and deception dominate. . . . A worthy counterpart to Frey’s previous bestselling novels.”
–New York Daily News
“Springs plenty of surprises . . . In Silent Partner, the villains are seldom what they seem–nor are the heroes.”
–Orlando Sentinel
Erik Singer's audiobook performance is smooth, solid, and nuanced. He's competent as man, woman, young, old, Latino, British, or Italian in Frey's portrayal of millionaires run amok. While some audiobook narrators are best suited for one genre or another, Singer has a versatile, gymnastic voice. And he moves at just the right pace, never overrunning or stalling the listener's internal movie of brutal murders, entrapment-sex, and other high-finance and political betrayals. The bestselling Frey must delight in Random House's selection of Singer, who does a suspense novel good in boosting Frey's no-nonsense dialogue and the listener's emotional responses to the heroes and the villains. D.J.M. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
