In the fast-paced world of international finance, the money never sleeps.
In Coming For Money, international investment broker Paris Smith finds himself in a high-stakes gamble to save his career. In order to close this multi-million dollar deal, Paris must travel halfway around the globe and back again, unaware of the treachery and deceit that shadows every move he makes. Still reeling from the sudden death of his wife, Paris has thrown himself into his work. Always the star of his firm, people think he might have lost his edge. Can this deal put him back on top again? And where there is new hope, might there be love?
In this literary novel by F.W. vom Scheidt, the reader is treated to eloquent writing and a list of complex characters and situations. Intriguing and unique, Coming For Money is claimed to be part John Grisham and part John Updike. And though I see comparisions to The Firm, I also find the work original in its ability to depict one man's battle against himself. While his wife complained that he followed the money, and he never could quite deal with her depression, he seems powerless to break the cycle. When the stakes are this high, can he afford to?
Vom Scheidt puts his years as director of an international investment firm to excellent use in Coming For Money. It is obvious to the reader that those experiences formed a strong foundation for the novel. While a tad heavy on the similes and metaphors, this is an engaging read.
I am interested to see what F.W. vom Scheidt comes out with next.
Title: Coming for Money Author: F.W. vom Scheidt Publisher: Blue Butterfly Books ISBN: 978-0-9784982-8-3 $24.95 (U.S. and Canada)
Joining us today is F. W. vom Scheidt, author of Coming for Money.
How much money is too much? And how fast is too fast in life?
International investment firm director and author F. W. vom Scheidt, writes from his first hand-hand experience of the world of global money spinning with candor and authenticity in his remarkable literary novel Coming for Money.
As investment star Paris Smith steps onto the top rungs of the corporate ladder, he is caught between his need for fulfillment and his need for understanding; trapped between his drive for power and his inability to cope with his growing emptiness where there was once love. When his wife disappears from the core of his life, his loneliness and sense of disconnection threaten to overwhelm him. When he tries to compensate by losing himself in his work, he stumbles off the treadmill of his own success, and is entangled in the web of a fraudulent bond deal that threatens to derail his career and his life.
Forced to put his personal life on hold while he travels nonstop between Toronto, Singapore and Bangkok to salvage his career, he is deprived of the time and space necessary to regain his equilibrium.
In the heat and turmoil and fast money of Southeast Asia, half a world from home, and half a life from his last remembered smile, he finds duplicity, friendship and power --- and a special woman who might heal his heart.
A talented author, vom Scheidt has confidently crafted a fast-paced, highly readable and intelligent novel. His details are fascinating. His characters are real, and not easily forgotten. A deeply felt story about the isolation of today’s society, the prices great and small paid for success and the damages resulting from the ruthless exercise of financial power, Coming For Money is a taut literary page-turner about a man who refuses to capitulate to the darkness in his journey into the light.
I've asked the author to tell us a little of how he came to write this novel and about his main character, Paris Smith.
I sat down at the keyboard. Although I have always been a literary writer, I had no idea how I would capture my experiences in international finance in literary fiction. Without thinking, the first sentence came to me. I typed it. Then I looked at that sentence for a long time.
Instinct told me that the sentence had risen from something that was deeply absorbing me, and that it was something I had to tell. I knew I had to find some way to tell it truthfully. From that point, I knew there was no way out . . . except to construct the novel.
While Coming For Money is a story that advances from chapter to chapter along the corporate intrigue that beats at its heart, and continually mirrors the financial headlines of our daily newspapers, it is much more. It is an illustration of what happens to us as human beings when we lose emotional connectiveness, when we lose emotional logic.
And this was how Paris Smith came to me – because he is tragically, if admirably, flawed. He is not flawed in the classic Shakespearean sense of a noble man who is brought to ruin by his own avarice or rage. His weakness is not that he lusts after wealth or power or flesh. Rather, and far more important for us in these times, he is flawed in that he never learned the great lesson of his generation: don’t become emotionally involved. Paris Smith’s weakness is that he needs, and has always needed, emotional involvement in order to sustain his life. It is for him – as, ultimately, it is for us all – as necessary as breathing.
As Paris Smith refuses to relinquish his search for emotional connectiveness, he becomes a character we learn to appreciate and admire. In the sometimes stubborn, sometimes creative, battles he wages against other men in his corporation who are pitted against him, Paris Smith becomes ever more conscious of how he could stem his personal pain and loneliness by simply retreating emotionally and victimizing those around him. Or he might learn anew how to offer up his own emotional involvement. I’ll leave it for readers to see how this plays out in the end, and to decide what they may want to take away from his quest for human meaning in our contemporary world. But I hope readers will appreciate Paris Smith as much as I do.
In the fast-paced world of international finance, the money never sleeps.
, international investment broker Paris Smith finds himself in a high-stakes gamble to save his career. In order to close this multi-million dollar deal, Paris must travel halfway around the globe and back again, unaware of the treachery and deceit that shadows every move he makes. Still reeling from the sudden death of his wife, Paris has thrown himself into his work. Always the star of his firm, people think he might have lost his edge. Can this deal put him back on top again? And where there is new hope, might there be love?
