Brewing Up a Storm: A John Thatcher Mystery (John Putnam Thatcher Mysteries)
by Emma Lathen
from HarperTorch
Nothing stirs up trouble like booze, politics, murder and money--all prime ingredients in Emma Lathen's latest. The story involves a Chicago brewery that begins selling its nonalcoholic beer in a chain of children's restaurants. A morally minded Congressional committee gets involved when a political activist group, No Beer-Buying Youngsters (Nobby), chimes in. Things get dicey when the mouthy leader of Nobby is gunned down, leaving the lords of Wall Street nervous about this venture.
When a 19-year-old boy dies in a drunk driving accident, Madeline Underwood decides to convince the world that Kischel Brewery's "soft drink" leads young people to try the harder stuff. But Underwood faces formidable enemies: Kischel's investment bankers, including the unmistakable John Putnam Thatcher, their razor-sharp attorneys and no less than the head of a Congressional committee that she's managed to publicly embarrass. So when Madeline is found dead, stuffed in the closet of the building where the committee convened, it takes all of Thatcher's acumen to sift through a long list of killers. It's the case that would drive a lesser man to drink.
A Shark Out of Water: A John Putnam Thatcher Mystery
by Emma Lathen
from HarperCollins Publishers
At first glance, a banker-as-private eye seems a less than scintillating choice for a mystery novel's hero, but it doesn't take long for Emma Lathen's protagonist, John Putnam Thatcher, to win the reader's heart and mind in Shark Out of Water. Putnam, a Wall Street banker, is in Gdańsk trolling for new investment opportunities when a whistle-blowing member of a European consortium turns up dead. In the course of solving the murder, Putnam also delivers a neat explanation of international finance, which is nearly as fascinating as the crime itself. Money, murder, and an exotic setting--Lathen delivers the goods with style and panache.
The deal was murder
A megabucks investment opportunity draws financier/sleuth John Putnam Thatcher to the decaying Polish port if Gdansk, where a killing can be made if the busy canal there is rebuilt--long a dream of maverick Baltic business official Stefan Zabriski. But cutthroat politicking and partying among multinational shippers, bankers, and ecologists can be costly, and fatal, for Zabriski turns up dead after a serious champagne bash. Drawn into a sticky merger of power games, crooked commerce, and international intrigue, Thatcher must speculate on a deal more lethal that any he's ever seen on Wall Street.
Right on the Money: Right on the Money (John Putnam Thatcher Mysteries)
Banking on Murder: Three by Emma Lathen : Death Shall Overcome, Murder Against the Grain, a Stitch in Time
East Is East/a John Putnam Thatcher Mystery
by Emma Lathen
from HarperTorch
Come to Dust: An Inner Sanctum Mystery
For years now, Emma Lathen has been writing her crisp&entertaining mysteries centering around John Putnam Thatcher, the formidable vice-president of Sloan Guaranty Trust. Miss Lathen is something of a financial wizard herself,&her talent for making the world of high finance believable&exciting is always an added dividend to her intricate ticker-tape plots. In 'Come to Dust', Thatcher is torn, grudgingly, from his Wall Street eyrie to search for a stolen $50,000 bearer bond&to track down the puzzling Elliot Patterson, model suburban husband, father&thief. The bond was slated for the coffers of Brunswick College, Patterson's alma mater,&it is to Brunswick that Thatcher goes, where he is sure both bond&Patterson will emerge. Instead, he is confronted by a callous cover-up murder&the alarming knowledge that Patterson is still on the loose. As Thatcher becomes deeply enmeshed in a grand larceny&murder among the well-heeled alumni of an Ivy League school, Miss Lathen takes wonderfully biting potshots of some of our most sacred well-heeled traditions&the&the perpetuators thereof. No one, including Thatcher, escapes unscathed as she alternately sympathizes with and mocks the very people she has created. But, in a triumph of solid suspense writing, she never lets Thatcher forget that murder is the most unforgivable of human follies. And Thatcher, for all his wry, detached view of the madness inherent in the groves of academe, is after a murderer. The killer's identity, of course, comes as a surprise, even to our august Wall Street samurai. But Thatcher has the last word-a final conclusion that is stunning for its irony: there are, it seems, some actions that are worse than murder.
Accounting for Murder (Otto Penzler's Classic American Mystery Library)
by Emma Lathen
from Scribner Book Company
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