Thrillers, Business, Work, & Money - Fiction, Occupations - Fiction

Play Money

Name: Play Money
Author: Phillip Allen
ISBN: 9781569473382

by Phillip Allen

Write a review

Overview

Praise for Play Money:

"Play Money is an authentic, detailed portrayal of life and ambition in the late '90s financial games, when we knew better but couldn't resist."-Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do with My Life?

"In the spirit of Michael Lewis's Liars Poker and Wolfe's A Man in Full, Allen offers a peek at Wall Street's money-making machine in the gilded age of the 1990s. Here is a full cast of characters-venture capitalists, corporate bankers, entrepreneurs as well as various hangers on-waiting for their turn to milk the IPO machine. A wonderful chronicle of the heady internet years. I could not put it down; I loved it."-Aleksander Rozens, Senior Editor, Private Equity Week, IPO Reporter

Tim Fletcher is at the top of his law school class and assured of a comfortable berth in the best firm in Virginia. But the senior-most partner urges him to acquire some New York Experience before joining the firm. Tim agrees to the apprenticeship in the Big Apple, which is roaring with dot-com investments and the accompanying deluge of corporate legal work. It is lucrative albeit grueling labor with endless hours and little down time, even as all around him traders and investors are exuberant with stupendous payoffs from gravity-defying market gambles. Ambition rules. An opportunity appears, a shortcut to the top. It's irresistible and Tim becomes COO and general counsel of a dot-com startup, preparing to launch its stock into the heady stratosphere with an initial public offering.

Venture Capitalist Alan Goldberg, who has made millions in the past but is in disfavor with his new partners at their private investment bank, is intrigued by thisstartup. Rebecca Bartlett is a young, celebrated stock analyst whose every utterance moves the market. She, too, casts her eyes on Tim's IPO. With a little help, these three are going to write another wild page of stock market lore and change their essential selves forever.

Phillip Allen, a thirty-year-old Wall Street lawyer, is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and of Duke Law School. This is his first novel.

About the Author, Phillip Allen

Phillip Allen is thirty-one years old and a former Wall Street lawyer. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife and child. This is his first novel.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

A 30-year-old Wall Street lawyer and first-novelist depicts young men caught up in the sparkling and expensive world of 1990s financial intrigue. Tim Fletcher is a bit disillusioned with the biz after eight months, and can't stop himself from mentioning the Post sympathetically and using chewing tobacco when he finally meets Kathleen, whose library is as impressive as his own. Alan is either a big mover and shaker, or simply a proxy who can't stop himself from shaking when homeboys on the subway leer at him. And Martin is the smooth operator with a deal for both of them: some hot new software, needing only a lawyer and a venture capitalist to make their dream IPO come true. How can Tim resist, with all those D-cups passing him endlessly on the street, and how will Alan otherwise hope to reconcile his Jewish mother and secular humanist wife when all his other deals keep dissolving beneath his feet? Of course they both go for Martin's deal, but is it a fantasy? A Faustian bargain? And what will Kathleen think now that she's calling him "honey"? Apart from a lot of financial jargon Tom Clancy would aspire to if he were to tackle the financial world, Allen's characters and his New York are largely familiar (as if with his authorial eye on film execs, Allen describes one character as parading about like Tom Cruise at the first screening of Top Gun). But if the author lacks something in fictional craft, he at least attempts to redeem things with portraits of financial old hands and savvy analysts, though his best bit has nothing to do with either character or plot: "The ticker-the chosen metaphor for an epoch too impatient, too cocksure, to leave the choosing to the future, its symbolic natureattested to by its misnomer and mass proliferation at exactly the moment when it was no longer of any use. It did not tick; what did anymore?" A debut novel with lots of zeroes coming after it.