FREE TO TRADE by Michael Ridpath - FIRST EDITION BOOK

Ex-Olympic runner Paul Murray has traded in his running shoes for a different, more exhilarating kind of speed. As a bond trader at a small but formidable London financial house, Paul is apprenticed to Hamilton McKenzie, a coldly brilliant trader who has made it his business to expand the international scope of the company. Paul feels as though he has found a professional home, and even begins to fall in love with his bold, irreverently funny colleague, Debbie Chater. On the night Debbie's body is dragged from the murky waters of the Thames, Paul begins a progressive and chaotic tumble into a darker world of trading . . . where there is more to lose than just market position. In sorting through Debbie's papers, Paul discovers suspicious details involving an investment in a shell company in the Netherlands Antilles. Setting out to discover more about this deal and Debbie's death, he turns up a rogues' gallery of nasties - a psychopathic bond trader, a shady international entrepreneur, and an unscrupulous salesman - none of whom would think twice about killing off a young, too inquisitive woman who is in over her head and in their way. The more Paul probes into Debbie's death and the ever more suspicious circumstances surrounding it, the more inexorably he becomes caught up in a web of international chicanery that could end up costing him more than just his career