The Crash
by Robert Peston
read by Matt Addis
Part 2 of the Gil Peck series
London, 2007. It's summer in the City: the economy is booming, profits are up and the stock market sits near record highs.
But journalist Gil Peck is a lone voice worrying it can't last. Deep in the plumbing of the financial system, he has noticed strange things happening which could threaten the whole economy. But nobody wants to hear it: not the politicians taking credit for an end to boom and bust, not the bankers pocketing vast bonuses, not even Gil's bosses at the BBC, who think it's irrelevant.
When Gil gets a tip-off that a small northern bank has run out of money, everything changes. His report sparks the first run on a UK bank in 140 years. The next day, Marilyn Krol, a director of the Bank of England dies in an apparent suicide.
For Gil, it's personal. Marilyn was his lover: was his scoop connected to her suicide? Or is there something more sinister in her death? Robert Peston is ITV's political editor, presenter of the politics show Peston, founder of the education charity, Futures for All (www.futuresforall.org), and vice president of Hospice UK. He has written five critically acclaimed non-fiction books, How Do We Fix This Mess?, Who Runs Britain?, Brown's Britain, How To Run Britain and WTF?, which was described by the Financial Times as 'mandatory reading' for anyone seeking to understand Brexit, Trump and the collapse of confidence in western liberalism. His first thriller, The Whistleblower, published by Zaffre, was 'brilliant' according to the Guardian and called 'a rollicking read' by the Evening Standard. Its sequel, The Crash, was praised as 'clever' by the Times and as 'fast paced' by the Financial Times.
For a decade until the end of 2015, he was at the BBC, as economics editor and business editor, and in the 1990s he was at the Financial Times, as political editor, financial editor and head of investigations. At the BBC he played a prominent role in exposing the causes and consequences of the credit crunch, banking crisis and Great Recession. Peston has won more than 30 awards for his journalism, including Journalist of the Year and Scoop of the Year (twice) from the Royal Television Society. Find him on his blog at itv.com/robertpeston, and on Substack and X as @peston. He hosts a podcast with Steph McGovern, The Rest is Money. The heart-stopping new thriller from the UK's top political journalist and Sunday Times bestseller. EXCELLENT SALES: We've sold 100k copies of Robert's debut The Whistleblower - including 20k hardbacks. A real inde and high street favourite. *THE* EXPERT ON FINANCE: The Crash starts at the run up to the 2008 financial crash, the subject for which Peston is best known, having broken the Northern Rock story. DEDICATED AUTHOR: Robert is up for all kinds of PR activity, both at party conferences and in independent bookshops, Waterstones stores and around the places he travels. MAJOR PR CAMPAIGN: The Whistleblower was reviewed by every major newspaper, and there is huge excitement for The Crash - with a big campaign planned on publication.