Wall Street Noir (Akashic Noir)
Starred Review.Spiegelman, the ideal editor for the Wall Street entry in Akashic's noir anthology series, assembles a stellar cast of 17 crime genre luminaries, many with financial backgrounds. Standouts include Peter Blauner's The Consultant, in which a pregnant business coach discovers La Donna within as she maneuvers a Bensonhurst-bred Don Corleone wannabe into a war he can't win; Twist Phelan's A Trader's Lot, in which commodities traders strategize on how to profit off a hurricane due to strike the Gulf Coast; and John Burdett's The Enlightenment of Magnus McKay, in which a lawyer representing a crooked Thai-Chinese businessman falls in love with a beautiful prostitute in Bangkok and slips into an opium dream from which he may never wake. Mark Haskell Smith, Jason Starr, Jim Fusilli and Reed Farrel Coleman also contribute fine stories. As this volume demonstrates, Wall Street is no longer restricted to lower Manhattan, but has become a worldwide theater in which greed, volatility and desperation often lead to crime.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.