Ghosts of Manhattan

With protestors occupying Wall Street and the country in an uproar over the greed and corruption in financial sector, it has become difficult to remember the banking world before the 2008 crisis. With Ghosts of Manhattan (Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster; October 2, 2012; 978-1-4516-7259-6; $24.00) author Douglas Brunt brings readers back to the extravagant times before Bear Stearns went belly up and exposes a culture where bonuses seemed boundless and the company expense account was routinely used for bar tabs, visits to a strip clubs, and worse. In his wryly comic, first-person fiction debut Brunt offers a withering view of life on Wall Street from the perspective of an unhappy insider, rundown by the corrosive lifestyle which is jeopardizing his marriage, but too hooked on the money to find a way out.

It's 2005 and the living is easy. Nick Farmer is thirty-five years old and thriving as a successful bond trader with the seemingly unstoppable investment bank Bear Stearns. His work-related nightlife is a swirl of liquor, strip clubs, hookers, and cocaine, which leaves very little time for a meaningful relationship with his increasingly frustrated wife. Nick clears seven figures every year and has become fiercely addicted to his annual bonus. But the debauch Wall Street lifestyle is taking a toll on him-and his marriage.

Fred Cook, an anxious, socially inept market risk analyst, comes to Nick with his dire predictions about where Bear's high-flying mortgage-backed securities trading may lead. Nick becomes involved with Fred's official risk report, one that no one at Bear wants to acknowledge. To make matters more complicated, Nick is being pursued by a hot cable TV financial journalist who seems to be more interested in him than in discovering Bear's secrets. Nick also fears that his own wife may have found a new romantic interest, which may prove to be the last straw in Nick's personal and professional undoing.

In this gripping debut novel, Douglas Brunt offers an in-depth look at the staggering excess in banking before the crash and the reach of its devastating personal impact. By turns hilarious and harrowing, Ghosts of Manhattan takes readers into the seedy underbelly of the finance world and chronicles the rarified lifestyle of a charming but flawed character as he struggles to find the right path in a complicated urban heart of darkness.

Until 2011, Douglas Brunt was CEO of Authentium, Inc., an Internet security company. He now writes full time and is currently working on his second novel. A Philadelphia native, he lives in New York with his wife, FOX News Anchor Megyn Kelly, and their two children. www.DouglasBrunt.com.