Forged Metal - Softcover

Campbell, Lesley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593041917 ISBN 13: 9780593041918

Publisher: Bantam Press, 1998

Synopsis

Rio Oliver is a successful commodity broker, but in 1991 she is stale. As she explores the Russian Metal Markets, she discovers to her horror that since the collapse of communism, Western industrialists have been exploiting the Russians, and resolves to do all in her power to help them.

About this title

From the Publisher

Summary of book
Forged Metal is an explosive debut novel about Alexandra Brookes, successful commodity broker. A chance encounter with a Russian metals trader could represent just the opportunity she is looking for. In the cut throat world of futures trading, Alex decides to assist the beleaguered russians.

From the Author

A fast-paced thriller with a twist
Alexandra Brookes is one of the new breed of City traders, cool smart and confident. She runs the trading floor of Wellington Commodities, in the cut-throat world of futures trading. Calm and analytical, she is in control.

In 1991, Alex turns to Russia for a new challenge and weighs in without realising that she is moving into the territory of the Mafia. Her rival, Kartchak, sits in his fortified office in the Tverskaya and silently watches her progress. As he picks off his competitors one by one, he looks forward to leaving Alex till last.

There is a particular kind of sadism in the way the Russian Mafia operates, a kind of casual brutality which Alex suddenly finds herself confronted with. Hanging around the lobby of her Moscow hotel, she witnesses the murder of her contact. The killer puts the gun to his head, pulls the trigger and casually walks away. In the dirty underpass which runs beneath the Bolshoi ballet to Red Square, another partner is killed, pleading like a frightened schoolgirl to be shot quickly in the heart and not left to die in the squalid underworld of hawkers and beggars.

Alex begins to realise just how she has been duped. It was a perfect sting. Everything she has seen and been told has been part of a clever charade and she flies back to London with just two days left to unwind the plan she herself devised to corner the market.

The market is nervous. Scenes of frenzied trading on the floor of the commodity exchange are juxtaposed with scenes of mindless aggression in the back streets of Moscow. Kartchak executes his enemies with casual efficiency, teasing the dying, taking every ounce of pleasure from the last minute pleadings of his victims. As the markets begin to heat up, Alex watches the panic spread and tries to defuse the timebomb she has placed in one of the world's biggest financial markets.

Forged Metal is a financial thriller written by a journalist and former trader. It deals with the impact on a slick London trader, used to doing billion dollar deals on a computer, of trading outside the protective framework of the City. Human responses to inhuman behaviour. The violence is uncompromsing, the language authentic. I believe Forged Metal is, above all, realistic, not least in the depiction of the very disturbing, casual barbarism that I experienced first hand in the Russian business world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593041917
• ISBN 13: 9780593041918
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288