I have always been fascinated by how criminal activities are treated in the financial sector. How long it takes for white collar fraudsters to be taken down and how much it takes to put them into jail. Reading about large scale fraud in finance and business is always a portrait of the times, like the dot.com hype or the subprime disaster. This is why I wrote the thriller “The Zurich Conspiracy” ( it is fiction) about how some big shareholders gutted and destroyed companies in Switzerland, a calamity seen through the eyes of a young woman who works as event manager in such a company. It ends in murder, of course.
I consider some books that capture the crisis and the environment that fueled it among the best non-fiction writing, like “The Smartest Guys in the Room” by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, or “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis. Another great (new) book is “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou. Here is the publisher`s blurb: “In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.” A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.” I can highly recommend the book!
