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Death Benefit (2011)








Not long ago I read the novel DEATH BENEFIT by Robin Cook.

The set up is this: after the financial crisis of 2008, two newly unemployed bankers started LifeDeals Inc.  Their business plan? selling annuities to people with known illnesses, and given their database about the medical facts along with the tendency of many humans to be excessively optimistic about their own longevity, they could do so on terms profitable to themselves. 

The two principals of LifeDeals are distinguished as characters: Russell is the quant and computer geek, Edmund the hale alpha male.

The key to the plot is that LDI is heavily dependent on its settlements with patients with diabetes. Thus, a breakthrough in research into the regeneration of the pancreas using stem cells could destroy it.

Another business entity that enters into the plot is called Big Skies. This seems to be a multi-strategy hedge fund, and it is shorting LDI in the credit derivatives market (in other words, betting that LDI will be forced to default.)

Big Skies is led by one Gloria Croft. (The name sounds like the video game heroine Lara Croft.)  She is the one who gets to make indignant speeches about how crooks selling inherently flawed products created the crisis of 2007-08 and ought to be in prison. In her view, Russell and Edmund are of that number.

SPOILER ALERT: If you have any thought of reading the book, and want to be surprised, stop reading here.

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Anyway, Gloria Croft apparently has discovered, through studying patent applications, that there is a lot of promising activity  at Columbia University regarding the regeneration of the pancreas.  It will mean devastation for the two men she despises, and lucrative vindication for her.

After laying out this exposition, Cook shifts his focus mostly to the campus of Columbia, where the real protagonists of the novel reside, study, and work in labs. The guy doing the ground-breaking work on the pancreas mysteriously dies. A beautiful woman assistant of his decides to personally investigate the cause of death.

The culprit behind it all turns out to be -- not too much of a shocker here, Mr. Cook -- Edmund of LDI. The subsidiary villains are members of the Albanian mob.

Gloria Croft drops out of the action when that action turns to Columbia.   She's mentioned much later, in passing, as one of the victims of the Albania contractors.

I think it is heartening in a way that Gloria Croft is portrayed so positively. The hedge fund industry should be happy. A short seller serving as even a subsidiary protagonist of such pulp?

It would have been better had she survived to the end and been showered in money as a result of her accurate prognostication and the subsequent investment decision. But, hey, it is something.

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