15 Financial Thrillers Perfect for the Beach

The Fund (Forge Books, 2011)
H.T. Narea
Narea, with two decades as an investment banker to his credit, offers the tale of Kate Molares, an American intelligence operative hot on the trail of nefarious deeds being planned by a Middle Eastern hedge fund.

The fund, she discovers, is using its profits to back terrorist activities. The end game at hand: complete destruction of the U.S. financial system through weapons of mass destruction and a full-on assault of the Federal Reserve.

The Gods of Greenwich (Minotaur Books, 2011)
Norb Vonnegut

Vonnegut (a distant relation to that other famous writer of the same last name), draws upon his past wealth management career with Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions as a Wall Street commentator (he has a popular blog, Acrimoney) and writer of fiction.

The Gods of Greenwich, as the title suggests, is set in the high-rolling world of hedge funds. Our hero, Jimmy Cusack, described as a "tough kid from a blue-collar neighborhood who made good on Wall Street" and facing personal calamities -- his hedge fund has collapsed and the bank is foreclosing on his condominium -- all while his wife is pregnant.

Seemingly good news comes from a job with a shady firm named Leeser Capital, which always seems to come out ahead no matter what the markets are doing. Its various acts of skullduggery (involving an Icelandic bank and insurance fraud) soon put Cusack in peril.

Frey is also the author of Top Producer (Minotaur, 2009), his debut novel, about a mysterious, gruesome death that coincides with the disappearance of large sums of money from a successful hedge fund.