A Fatal Debt

Financial journalist Gapper (All That Glitters: The Fall of Barings, with Nick Denton) charts a Wall Street CEO’s fall from grace in his earnest if uneven first novel. Ben Cowper, a psychiatrist at New York’s Episcopal Hospital, is dismayed to learn from the TV news that banker Harry Shapiro, an emergency admission Cowper examined and released, has killed himself at his East Hampton beach house. In fact, Shapiro, though quite depressed at recently losing his job, is alive, though he’s far from well, since the body at Shapiro’s house turns out to be his former partner, Marcus Greene, with whose murder he’s charged. Cowper’s profession is on the line—the hospital wants a sacrificial lamb—which leads the somewhat hapless Cowper to investigate the murder himself. Solid prose and a strong cast compensate only in part for a contrived plot with too much of Cowper’s backstory and not nearly enough suspense. Readers will find it hard to feel much more than pity for the clueless Cowper. Agent: David Kuhn, Kuhn Projects. (June)