Review: How Good Accountants Go Bad
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 30, 2014
New Yorker Jack Cole, a financial analyst working his way up the corporate ladder, lands what he believes is a career-making assignment at his investment bank by managing the takeover of a Midwestern manufacturer by his firm. The promises of substantial bonuses and future advancement cause him to overlook the shady sides of the deal, and he soon finds that the assignment lands him in exceedingly hot and dangerous water.There is the framework in place in this book for an exciting story exploring the fast-moving world of investment banking and finance in the 1980s where there was little oversight and a lot inside dealing that made billions for some and lost a lifetime of dreams for others.There were several flaws that prevented the book from reaching its potential mostly due to trying to be many things at once, going from an inside look at the world of financial manipulations to a murder investigation to a morality play. Any one of these would have been sufficient to build into an engaging story with one of the others used as a minor subplot. The shifting of emphasis from one plot to the other as the book progresses leaves the previous plot hanging as the new plot is center stage. When it finally comes back around to addressing portions of the original plot, many details and resolutions of characters and plot points are overlooked and never resolved for the reader because of the shifting emphasis of plots that has occurred.Another problem is with the main character, Jack. He's supposed to be a bright guy in his early thirties with an MBA and several years of experience in the corporate world, yet he is constantly making exceedingly bad decisions in both his personal finances as well as his business conduct. It might be argued that the business mistakes were made because that's simply the way things were done in that there-and-then, but the personal ones are of monumental proportion and might be expected of a kid straight out of college, but not of someone who has been paying his own way for over a decade. How could any business trust this man to handle millions of dollars worth of deals when he can't even make a wise decision about how to spend his salary? Without this stream of poor decisions, the middle plot of the story would fall apart.Luckily there were a couple of really likable characters, Detective Turner and Jack's girlfriend Lisa, who helped to hold the story together later in the book.Lastly, this book is a textbook example of why one cannot depend on spell checking to substitute for either editing or proofreading. The number of mistakes, most obviously caused by the use of a poorly designed spell check program, are on every page of the book along with many punctuation errors made by someone who does not understand the correct usage of commas, apostrophes, periods, or rules of capitalization. Formatting was not a problem, but the multiple editing errors were extremely distracting. These errors cost the book a star in my rating.Marginally recommended.