In her abysmal second novel, Monaghan (The Killing Jar
) delves into the manic, drug-fueled world of late 1990s English finance. Ambitious Frankie Cavanagh gets a job as a floor trader at the London futures and options exchange. Under the lead of her boss, Tom Phillips, an attractive and cocky American, she maneuvers the male-dominated world, slowly earning the trust and respect of some of the men while alienating others. A sexual attraction to Tom evolves into an affair driven by booze, cocaine, Ecstasy, and daring games of chicken that rush headlong toward disaster. While the descriptions of the human mania of the trading floor in its last throes before electronic trading took over are revealing, the tension in this novel flags around Frankie and Tom's relationship and Frankie's dithering about her life. Flabby sentences, flirtations with cliché, and a ridiculous conclusion will leave readers somewhere between puzzled and disappointed. (May)
