On The Edge
From his past as an RAF fighter pilot to his job as a bond trader in the City, Alex Calder is a man known for taking big risks – and winning.
But when colleague Jennifer Tan decides to pursue a sexual harassment case against her boss, Calder witnesses the ugly side of his world. And the tragic. For Jen commits suicide and Calder quits in disgust.
One year on, Calder is running a flying school in Norfolk. But the past won’t disappear. When a former colleague of Jen's vanishes while visiting Jean-Luc Martel – the infamous “Man Who Broke the Euro” – in his mountain paradise in the Rockies, Calder sees the tragic events of twelve months earlier in an even more sinister and terrifying light.
And this time, he’ll risk his reputation, his livelihood and even his life on seeing justice is done…
Writing On The Edge
On the Edge deals with four themes that are highly topical in the City at the moment: sexual harassment, the disruptive effect of hedge funds, the dangers of complex derivatives and European integration. It is also about the increasing inhumanity of many of the large investment banks.
One of the joys of writing a thriller is that you don't have to go in for all that tedious 'on the one hand ... on the other hand' rubbish. You just give your characters strong prejudices and let them fly! It's fair to say they cause quite a lot of damage in this book.
A word of warning. Derivatives are complicated financial products. The more complicated they are, the more profitable they become to the investment banks that issue them. In On the Edge they are very complicated. It is quite permissible for the reader to skim the few paragraphs that describe them, but if you want to try to figure them out for yourself, be my guest. They do hang together, I promise you.
Postscript from 2024: On The Edge was published in 2005. In retrospect, the culture and the financial products in the book clearly point to something about to go badly wrong in the financial world. Although the Euro has survived!