My recent reading has included a novel kindly given me by a friend for Christmas, TOP PRODUCER written by Norb Vonnegut and brought out in 2009 by St. Martin's Press. SPOILER ALERT: On the off chance you haven't read this novel yet and plan to do so: please don't read further. The book begins by taking the metaphor of Wall Street as a "shark tank" quite literally. The boss of a hedge fund --or, strictly speaking, of a fund of hedge funds -- is murdered by being fed to the sharks at an aquarium. It turns out that the dead man, Charlie Kelemen, was engaged in various financial shenanigans that unsurprisingly made him enemies, and part of this was the blackmail of other people involved in financial shenanigans. The protagonist of the story is a friend of Charlie's named Grover O'Rourke, who works at the prop desk of a second-tier investment bank, and is a "top producer" there. Whether he was named after a president or a muppet is unc...
