The
Girl in the Vault
By
Michael Ledwidge
On Sale: November 7, 2023
Publisher:
Hanover Square
Press Hardcover
ISBN: 9781335455086
Price: $30.00
About the
Book:
They
stole her dream. Now getting it back will take the perfect crime.
It’s summer in New York City and Faye Walker has
it all. She’s not only scored one of the most highly coveted internships in all
of Wall Street, she’s also just met the head-over-heels love of her life. With
her natural-born gift for numbers and a work ethic that knows no bounds, Faye
is a shoo-in for a full-time position at the illustrious merchant bank Greene
Brothers Hale. Then, just as she awaits her offer and her signing bonus, a
treacherous betrayal arrives to shatter Faye’s plans and her young life.
But what her high finance
masters-of-the-universe bosses don’t know is that Faye isn’t like any of the
other interns. Having made her way past her humble small-town beginnings, for
Faye, going back is not an option. That’s why Faye now has a new plan. One that
involves Swiss watch timing, nerves of steel and ten million dollars in cold
hard Wall Street cash.
"The Girl
in the Vault is Ledwidge's best."—James Patterson
Buy Links:
HarperCollins:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-girl-in-the-vault-michael-ledwidge?variant=41011396018210
Barnes
& Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-girl-in-the-vault-michael-ledwidge/1143129946
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1335455086/keywords=thrillers?tag=harpercollinsus-20
Sneak Peek Excerpt:
PART ONE: SUMMER
IN THE CITY
In New York City near the
southwest corner of 63rd Street and Madison Avenue, there is a restaurant
called Stella’s and when everything started, I was sitting in one of its
coveted lime-green velvet booths.
It was coming
on ten at night, and I was drinking a lemongrass daiquiri. In all my years on
the planet up to that point, I’d never touched lemongrass or daiquiris. Until
that summer. That summer it seemed like it’s all I drank.
“Should I
get you ladies started on a new one?” asked our waiter.
Our waiter
was named Tommy, and he was a fortysomething Italian guy with slicked back hair
who had the vaguely menacing solemn look of a Sopranos extra. But
intimidating demeanor aside, he was always exceptionally nice to us. And when I
say us, I mean my work cubicle mate, Priscilla Hutton, who was sitting across
from me.
Priscilla and Tommy were actually old pals as she
had been partying here at Stella’s since her Birch Wathen Lenox private high
school days.
I did some high school partying
myself back in my small town in Kentucky. Just never at a place that had
nine-thousand-dollar bottles of champagne on the menu and a VIP room described
in New York magazine as “Hollywood East.”
“The
answer to that is yes, Tommy,” Priscilla said. “My friend and I need two fresh
jolts stat. If that’s okay with you, Faye.”
Sometimes
I wonder about that question. I wonder about what would have happened if I’d
gone back to my apartment instead of accepting.
Or even
more importantly, about what wouldn’t have.
“I’m game
if you are,” I said, smiling.
The second
drink order surprised me. We usually had only one polite drink at the end of
the week here, down the street from our job, and then parted ways.
It was
part of our unspoken deal. I hooked up Priscilla by handling all of our
incredibly high-pressure work stuff, and Priscilla hooked me up by letting me
hang out with her a little.
Even
though I was totally carrying her, it was a good deal on both ends because
Priscilla was gorgeous and rich and knew everyone in New York. She’d actually
been in society pages like Avenue magazine ever since high school, each
time tan and perfect in an effortlessly stylish outfit that she just threw on
after a day spent surfing or skiing or at the spa.
Priscilla
was also one of those people who had that voice, that eastern establishment
rich person voice, that some call Transatlantic or Boston Brahmin or Locust
Valley lockjaw. Not a ton of it, not a pretentious amount, just a sophisticated
hint, an elegant tinge, just enough.
It made
her sound like a young Lauren Bacall or Bette Davis or someone. I loved just
listening to her. It made you feel a little special just to hear her confide in
you, as if only for a few moments, you were in the privileged people club,
too.
I really didn’t even know why Priscilla had applied for, let
alone accepted, our summer internship. It was extremely hard work, and she was kind of a ditz, so why not just take the Instagram
influencer route? I often wondered.
I think it had something to do with her
father’s business, some defense contractor aerospace company in Connecticut
that made airplane parts. Maybe she needed some finance experience to become an
executive there? Not that she had told me any of this, but I did have internet
access.
She even pretended to be my friend. She
shared fashion advice with me, which was a sorely needed lesson. And she also
told me all these incredible stories about her days in prep school and Yale and
Palm Beach and the Hamptons.
At least at the office. When she was in the
mood.
“But another?” I said as Tommy left.
“That’s okay, Priscilla. I know you have things to do. I should be going.”
“No, not yet. I owe you big time, Kemosabe.
If you hadn’t remembered to recheck the Westland account for me before it went
to the treasury team, that Aiken would have dragged me up the stairs of the
boiler room by the scruff of my neck.”
It was true. She had screwed up big time.
One of our biggest hedge fund clients wanted $130 million wired into their Cayman
account, but Priscilla had boneheadedly put in the account numbers of a
completely different fund instead. Getting a number wrong here and there
wasn’t a problem. Sending money into another fund’s account was. If it had gone
through, the money could have instantly disappeared without a trace with no way
to unwind it, and our client could have been out $130 million.
“Oh, that,” I said. “Don’t mention it.
Anytime. I was looking for something to do anyway.”
That’s when Priscilla looked at me, and we
both completely lost it.
Oh, we laughed then all right. Practically
until the lemongrass came from our nostrils.
Looking for something to do, I
thought, shaking my aching head.
That was a phrase I used way back in the
normal life I led before I accepted the summer internship at the venerated Wall
Street private investment bank, Greene Brothers Hale, nearly three months
before.
Our musty-smelling windowless basement
office a few blocks down Madison Avenue really did look like a boiler room or
maybe something out of a Dickens poorhouse. Only with computers and phones on
our cheap desks instead of dusty ledger books.
And out of these electronic torture
devices, all day—for pretty much twelve hours straight from eighty-seven
different pissed-off, stressed-out directions at once—came numbers.
The stress and anger directed our way was
due to the fact that the numbers represented money. Profoundly massive amounts
of money from hedge funds or institutional investors or just really, really
rich people. This money either needed to be placed into our bank’s fat cat VIP
client accounts or taken out of them and sent other places, places like the
Cayman Islands or Switzerland.
You’d think this given task was simple
enough like we were mere bank tellers, just moving around much larger sums.
But you would be wrong.
Each incoming or outgoing bank transfer had
to be placed in its proper slot. Each one processed through a verification process
wrapped in an amount of red tape to make your eyes bleed. Emails with these
numbers had to go to the proper people for due diligence verifications. All in
the proper order. Yesterday. Or else.
It was the volume of the orders. It was
staggering. The air traffic controllers out at Kennedy airport had less to
juggle.
Or maybe it was the unhinged wrath of the
psychopathic traders and other finance people on the upper floors of our building
who kept calling down to see if the transfers had cleared.
Where the hell was the money? they wanted to know. What the hell was wrong with us? Did
they actually have to f-ing come down there?
Every morning when I sat down and looked at
my newly filled inbox of waiting orders, I thought about the Greek hero,
Sisyphus, cursed to eternally roll his rock up that hill.
In envy.
Was he a summer Wall Street intern, too? I would
wonder.
And did I mention all of this labor and
misery was being extracted from me gratis?
That was
the kicker. Since it was an unpaid internship, we were only doing it for the possibility
of maybe getting a full-time entry level job as a junior investment
analyst.
My skin
was being flayed for free.
As I sat
there that Friday, attempting to cool my smoking brain with rum and lemongrass
syrup, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d been duped.
Because I
thought I was going to be a swashbuckling Wall Street pirate.
Instead, I’d been shanghaied and thrown into the slave galley
to row.
Author Bio:
MICHAEL LEDWIDGE is the
writer of seventeen novels, the last dozen being New York Times bestsellers
cowritten with one of the world’s bestselling authors, James Patterson. With
twenty million copies in print, their Michael Bennett series is the
highest-selling New York City detective series of all time. One of their
novels, Zoo, became a three-season CBS television series. He lives
in Connecticut.
Social Links:
Website: https://www.michaelledwidge.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialMichaelLedwidge/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mike.ledwidge/
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8213.Michael_Ledwidge
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