Shakedown

Silver Award Winner, 2010 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards (Bill Fisher Award, Best First Book, Fiction); ABA Indie Next List Great Reads selection. An employee discovers a benefits miscalculation. A corporation unravels. A mistake? Or murder? Tom Hollister, Sledd Payne's public relations executive, is bone tired, a show pony no longer needed to sell tickets for Wall Street's most highly-respected financial services giant. When Chairman John Windham offers him a $3 million incentive to whitewash a growing financial scandal, Hollister doesn't know that he is about to uncover a murder conspiracy and an insidious fraud that could threaten the life savings of millions of investors and bring Sledd Payne to its knees. Battling an increasingly bitter wife and two grown children he barely knows, Hollister seeks solace in the arms of an aging call girl. Helen is at a crossroads of her own, haunted by suspicions from her past. Hollister is drawn to her, unaware of her connections to Sledd Payne's crimes. When rising executive Cassie Biagi first confronts Hollister with her concern that a massive insider trading scheme is buried within the company's computer systems, he doesn't believe her. But as he investigates Cassie's findings, a dangerous cat-and-mouse game begins between Hollister and Marcus Edison, who is not only in competition with Hollister for the corporate presidency, but has reasons of his own for wanting the investigation to disappear.Against the backdrop of a corporate meltdown, Hollister races to expose the fraud and bring the killers to justice, even though the truth could cost him his life and everything he has come to love. SHAKEDOWN is an unforgettable story of corporate corruption and treachery, a nonstop thriller that will keep readers riveted until the very last page. Chicagoland Indie Bestseller; Best of 2009 Selection, The Poisoned Pen Bookstore, Scottsdale, Arizona