EXCERPT TOUR: TO CATCH A BAD GUY by Marie Astor

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Marie will be awarding custom designed semiprecious jewelry pieces to five randomly drawn commenters during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops in the tour. Remember...the more times you comment, the better your chances of winning.

Prize 1: Citrine quartz and prehnite sterling silver necklace
Prize 2: Red agate sterling silver necklace
Prize 3: Onyx sterling silver bracelet
Prize 4: Smoky quartz sterling silver earrings
Prize 5: Blue quartz sterling silver earrings

Janet Maple’s stellar career ended with a layoff and her boyfriend of five years told her that he wants to be just friends. When she lands a job at one of New York’s premier boutique investment firms, Janet begins to hope that her luck is finally turning for the better. Not only is she happy with her new paycheck, but things also seem to be looking up on the personal front, as the company’s handsome attorney expresses keen interest in Janet. However, her euphoria is short-lived, as Janet soon discovers alarming facts about her new employer’s business tactics. When her boss dismisses her suspicions as groundless, Janet finds herself confiding to a cute IT engineer, Dean Snider. The closer she gets to Dean, the more Janet is tempted to break her rule of not dating co-workers, but what she doesn’t realize is that everything she knows about Dean, including his occupation and even his name, is a lie.

Dennis Walker is a top-notch white collar crime investigator who will stop at nothing to put culprits away. When an opportunity for an undercover assignment at one of New York’s premier boutique broker dealers comes up, Dennis jumps at the chance, adopting a persona of geeky IT engineer, Dean Snider. While he may be an ace at his job, years of experience fail him when Dennis meets Janet Maple and finds himself torn between his professional obligations and his personal desires. Will he have to choose between his feelings and duty, or will he find a way to satisfy both?

READ AN EXCERPT

Dennis Walker sat behind his desk with a smile glinting on his face. He had stopped by Janet Maple’s office for a casual chitchat, but when he noticed the reports on her desk, Dennis knew he had struck gold. Dennis considered himself to be in possession of many unique and valuable traits, but the trait that had proven to be exceptionally beneficial to him was a photographic memory. He could literally glance at a page in a book and be able to reconstruct the image in his mind afterwards. This quality had been most useful in his college days and in his career as a trader, but it became invaluable in Dennis’s role as an investigator.

Now, as he pretended to look at his computer screen, Dennis reconstructed the details of the reports he had glimpsed on Janet’s desk. He had only managed to steal a few short glances without raising Janet’s suspicion, but even that had been enough. From the settlement records that Dennis had previously obtained, he already knew that the majority of Bostoff’s order flow came from Emperial, Creaton, Rigel, Gemini, and Sphinx. While the settlement data had been useful to Dennis in confirming the extent of Bostoff’s involvement with these questionable entities, it did not show the sequence of the trades sent to Bostoff by its clients. The report only showed the volume of transactions for each client’s account and revenue received from each account. However, the trade blotter report that Janet had on her desk showed the time sequence in which the orders were executed, and Dennis remembered with vivid clarity the cluster of orders from Emperial, Creaton, and Rigel. They were all short sales centered in the same security – the name of the company had been in the news lately in reference to increased volatility in its stock price. Dennis had only seen a snippet of the trading blotter, but he was fairly certain that the rest of the blotters would show a similar pattern. Dennis had been trying to get his hands on the trade blotter reports for a while. He had inquired casually with the head of the Operations group about how this data was stored, but had been politely told that the trade blotter report generating system was outsourced to a vendor and did not require support from internal IT. Dennis tried to break into the report system, but upon failing on several tries, he was at his wits’ end. Today he had stumbled upon a solution. Who would have thought that the firm’s legal department would have access to such nitty-gritty data? Normally, the legal folks sat in the ivory tower, deeming themselves too important to mar their hands with anything other than legalese memos. Janet Maple, however, did not mind getting her hands dirty, which made Dennis like her all the more. And now he had a valid reason to get to know Janet better.

About the Author:Marie Astor is the author of contemporary romance novels This Tangled Thing Called Love, Lucky Charm, On the Rim of Love; romantic suspense To Catch a Bad Guy; and a short story collection, A Dress in a Window. Marie is also the author of young adult fantasy adventure novel, Over the Mountain and Back.

If you would like to learn more about Marie’s writing, please stop by her website: www.MarieAstor.com or visit her on Facebook.