When Joe Gallagher goes to work for an energy trading company in Boston , he soon finds that pursuit of his ambition to strike it rich in the markets will plunge him into a whirlwind, literally. As the firm's traders jockey to make bets on the effects of an upcoming hurricane, Gallagher must choose between following the careful dictates his old school veteran mentor, Andrews...Or become a disciple of The Ghost, a newly-hired boss whose maverick trading methods push the envelope, a binary trader's code of supreme wealth or complete ruin...
A voyeuristic tour through the fascinating subculture of high-powered energy traders, Short introduces us to the larger-than-life men and women who run our markets- people who inhabit a world of intense stress, unbelievable gluttony, and the consequences of making and losing tens of millions of dollars in a single day.
"Noir has been called an indigenous American art form, and Cortright McMeel uses its cold, black style to give his entertaining debut novel, Short, a swift, kicky drive… As a work in the Tom Wolfe-David Mamet school of finance, this is entertaining and feels just right. With his dark, wry portraits of the men behind the market, McMeel seems to be diagnosing all that's gone wrong with 21st-century Wall Street: its complex derivatives, its unseemly bonuses, its billionaire hedge-fund managers… Short is lithe and funny."
Jess Walter, The Washington Post
"The result is fueled by resonant high-octane prose that glues the reader to the pages; the temptation is to immediately go back and reread this singularly rich and satisfying work."
