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Annie Custer is a successful New York professional who thrives in the cut-throat world of Wall Street. One day, she gets a call from her best friend Carol, asking her to travel to Carol's parents' home on Staten Island to receive a bundle of stock certificates. While she knows that she is not allowed under the ethical rules of her business to receive and transport securities in this manner, she also knows that Carol has been very worried about her father's insistence that the securities remain in his home. Since he has finally decided to relinquish them to an institution, Annie decides, against her better judgment, to take possession of the stocks as a favor to her friend. Predictably, when Annie returns to her office with a shopping bag full of securities and bearer bonds, she finds that some of the bearer bonds on her carefully enumerated list are missing. $250,000 worth of them. Her record to this point has been spotless and she's worried about the professional repercussions of the situation. More than that, she knows that she didn't take the bonds and she wants the firm to investigate to find out who did. Her manager Brian thinks he's protecting both her and the firm by settling with Carol's family without a thorough investigation. September 11 casts a long shadow over this book. Annie's husband Ben was once her business partner and narrowly escaped from the World Trade Center that day. Now, three years later, he's still unable to work and passes his days watching the golf channel on television. Dina, their Argentinean housekeeper, holds the family together while Annie is preoccupied with work. Annie and Ben have two daughters, each of them a psychological wreck. Though they live in an incredible apartment and the girls attend private schools, everything is falling apart. Glass has assembled perhaps the least sympathetic group of characters ever encountered in a single book. There seems to be a competition going on among them for the title of most self-involved and dysfunctional. Everyone in the book has more money than is good for anyone, and each uses wealth as a shield that allows them to emotionally neglect everyone else. When the housekeeper departs for Argentina to be with her daughter who is pregnant, she leaves behind pictures that force Annie to face the truth of her life. Fortunately, it's all very easily solved and everyone ends up far better off than they were when the book started, except, of course, for the housekeeper, who disappears without comment after playing her pivotal role. Leslie Glass is the author of the wonderful April Woo series, so we know that she really can write when she wants to. In FOR LOVE AND MONEY, Glass extends her vacation from Woo to try her hand at another comic novel. Her last outing, OVER HIS DEAD BODY, met with decidedly mixed reviews, and, fortunately, Glass hasn't tried to turn that cast of characters into a series. Here she turns from the wine business to the world of Wall Street and stockbrokers, but, unfortunately, without much better success. Maybe we should start a petition to bring back April?
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, October 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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