Big Money by Jack Getze

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BIG MONEY is reads like an old-time Private Eye dime novel-not that this isn't a good thing. The main character is Austin Carr, a more or less disgraced stockbroker whose license is suspended. This is the second Getze novel with Carr as the lead.

Jack Getze is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times as well as a former trader, retail broker and financial counselor. His plots are based on his experiences and on stories he covered, so even though Austin Carr gets himself into some very tight jams, there is some truth to what is being written.

In Big Money, Austin Carr is left in charge of his New Jersey investment firm when his boss decides to "take a vacation". It seems the boss has been involving his business in a bloody battle between two feuding mafia families and a state investigator.

The main character does his best to calm down all the rather heated factions, stay clear of 3 women ,all of whom want him dead for one reason or another and keep his children safe when they witness a murder. The murder being just one of several that take place due to what his boss has been putting the business through while everyone else is working on actual stock and bonds brokerages.

Trying to stay upright and breathing, Carr learns about the secret lives of those around him. His favorite bartender/restaurant owner Luis, his boss' daughter (and co-worker) and her on again/off again marriage to a snake, the wife of a hit man named Creeper and even his ex-wife.

The way Getze has his characters speak made me think of the old fashioned movies with Humphrey Bogart. The language is rough around the edges and kind of hokey, but totally fitting given the mentality of everyone involved in the story.

His boss, Mr. Vick, has a mom who heads a faction of a mafia family-her Italian accent goes from almost Brooklynese to right off the boat in as little as one sentence. The Creeper goes from speaking in grunts to using third person analogies. Carr himself speaks as if he is a financial wizard one minute to sounding like a second rate PI the next.

Big Money kept me entertained and amused. I loved the way Austin Carr gave us little tidbits of how he was going to secure his monetary stability, but didn't actually allow us to figure it out until the very end.

I could understand his ex-wife's wrath over his having put his children in danger, just not the very fast turnaround in coming back into the picture. This extra little plot served a small purpose of sorts, but if it hadn't been included, it may have made for a much tighter ending. Maybe they were kept in since they may have been in the first of the series, Big Numbers, but in this case his ex-wife, son and daughter didn't really add enough to the storyline to make it more interesting.

Otherwise, BIG MONEY by Jack Getze would be an excellent read on a weekend getaway.