Starts good, but then fizzles

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	• The Frontrunner Paul Kilduff Hodder & Stoughton, 2001 - 454 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Starts good, but then fizzles

The title of this book, "The Frontrunner", refers to an illegal practice that stock dealers can engage in: buying some stocks personally just before placing a large buy order for a client. I found this piece of information, and many other descriptions of things such as hedge funds and derivatives, to be fascinating. It's clear that the author really knows a lot about the global stock markets and this is a major plus for the book.

The characterizations of the two main persons are also good. You don't expect the hero in a thriller to be a single father who spends a lot of time worrying about his children, nor do you expect the heroine to be a woman who was abused by her father. I like it when the characters in books are described as real people instead of being shallow clichés.

But now, unfortunately, I'm running out of positive things to say about this book.

The story starts out good but there are two serious problems. First, there is no really nasty bad guy that you can hiss and boo. The world's stock markets go into a tailspin but it's more or less just by chance, not because of the manipulations of some sinister and greedy villain. So the hero and heroine have to save the world, but without the benefit of a nasty opponent.

The second problem with the story is that towards the end of the book the author creates a situation that is obviously very contrived. The hero and heroine are trapped on the island of Bermuda and are being threatened by a couple of nasty and unscrupulous characters, but the way in which they get trapped and the extent of the threats (just enough to provide some tension but not enough to really create a panic) is so artificial that I practically lost all interest in the story.

Another problem is that I found it unrealistic that so many of the characters in the book were corrupt and unsavory. The Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board is cheating on his wife and so stupid that he thinks you can trust blackmailers. The Governor of the Bank of England is corrupt enough to try to make a personal killing out of the international stock market rescue effort. The Governor of the Bank of Japan is engaged in expenses fraud, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority faked his college diploma, and the President of the European Central Bank is passing insider information to a lover. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think this large a percentage of top businessmen are unethical.

Then there's a technical quibble that I have regarding the way in which the hero creates an Internet web page to unmask the bad guys. It's possible, although very unlikely, that our hero could learn how to use Microsoft FrontPage by just reading the manual, and learn how to use a scanner and an FTP program through trial and error. But then we're told that this web page, which contains dozens of scanned pictures, got one million "hits" during one day! That would give a bandwidth usage of several gigabytes, which is enough to bring any ordinary web server to its knees!

Finally, I found the author's writing style, with very short sentences and clever quips, to be somewhat irritating.

In summary, very good information about the global stock markets, good characterizations and a fairly good story until it becomes too contrived. But by the time you reach the end of the book you feel that the problems outweigh the good points.

Rennie Petersen

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