Given how often we are told by fictional cops and PIs that sex and money are the two most prevalent motives for murder, it's interesting that there are so few thrillers using the financial markets as a backdrop. After all, most of the world's great financial centres are rammed full of people who would launch RPGs at their grandmother's bungalow if they thought it would help them make a buck or two.
Perhaps the perceived complexity of the financial markets stops writers from straying into this area, perhaps it's just considered dull. I'm not sure.
But for debut novelist Martin Baker, a respected and high-profile London financial journalist, it's an obvious theatre for his work, given the grade school essay mantra, "write about what you know".
But even Baker is not prepared to take chances that the reading public will be satisfied by a tale of murder on the trading floor, and spices Meltdown up with as much sex as I can remember in any crime novel that doesn't feature the Marquis de Sade. And it's not plain vanilla sex either. There's something here for every armchair fetishist, and highly entertaining it is too.
What makes this aspect of the book doubly intriguing is that Martin Baker is married to Nicola Horlick, the highest profile female financier in the City, and a woman once labelled "Superwoman", for her making-gazillions/bringing-up-a-huge-family juggling act. Ordinarily this sort of information would be out of bounds for a review, as the writer's personal life is absolutely his own business. But Meltdown's publisher Macmillan have brought it into play with the promise of a "huge PR campaign, driven by Martin Baker's connection to Nicola Horlick, one of the country's most influential businesswomen".
Happily, Nicola Horlick is somebody who has always handled her public role with aplomb and has never appeared to be uncomfortable with the attention of the media. That said, she may want to start considering her answers to questions that might be as awkward as anything she has yet experienced, when Meltdown is published in early January.
Anyway, back to the book. Samuel Spendlove, an Oxford academic suffering post-divorce stress disorder, is persuaded by a media tycoon to take on a mysterious, undercover role spying on Khan, a legendary trader working in Paris. Spendlove settles quickly into his glamorous new role and adjusts quickly to high octane lifestyle of people who play even harder than they work.
He quickly discovers that the Ropner Bank he works for has just about the world's loosest compliance department and procedures and that there is all sorts of funny business going on, with Khan given the latitude to do as he pleases, much of it off the books and with no oversight, right up to and including destroying the positions of traders on his own floor.
Finding that life is not already complex enough, what with being undercover and all, Spendlove quickly complicates things for himself further by jumping into bed with delectable colleague Kaz Day. It's all pretty much downhill for him from there. When Kaz goes missing, and then turns up dead, Spendlove is quickly implicated in her murder, and finds himself at the centre of an international man hunt.
Meanwhile, Khan is playing havoc with the global financial markets, taking the world to the edge of economic catastrophe, and Spendlove is blamed for that also. He takes off into the Paris night accompanied by Kaz's former lesbian lover (see what I mean?) and with only her guile and his own considerable intellectual resources to get him out of trouble. To rescue his own life, Spendlove must find a way to outwit the world's most famous trader.
This is a book that will do little for the profile of the average City boy, who is already largely regarded by the wider public as a Champagne-quaffing, Bentley-driving, cocaine-snorting, greedy arrogant misogynist, as Baker exaggerates every financial market stereotype out there, and then some.
There was a serious danger that this could have killed Meltdown as a story, as it would be very easy for it to be labelled ridiculous and unrealistic, the comic book stuff of fantasy. But somehow it works. There is a greatness to the exaggeration here that makes for a helter-skelter story that moves at the pace of a cheetah on speed and simply bulldozes every objection and doubt the reader might have by careering on to the next scene before they've had a chance to register the improbability of what happened 10 lines before.
A lot of genre fiction depends on the reader's ability to suspend their belief for a few hours, and Baker seems to have that gift, writing with an assurance and conviction that leaves no room for doubt. And while the plot itself might be somewhat fantastical, it is also pretty tight and deftly handled, so that if you buy in on page 40, there's no reason to sell out further down the road.
Meltdown is not going to win Baker the Booker Prize, but I suspect it will win him something infinitely more valuable: a large army of thrill-seeking readers for whom this is the perfect commuting/beach read. It is entertaining, undemanding and relentless, and it's not difficult to see why Macmillan believes it has another star on its hands.
So my advice: sit back, switch off and enjoy the ride(s).