Annette Meyers was assistant to Broadway producer-director Harold Prince for sixteen years, and then she was an executive search and management consultant on Wall Street for as long. With her husband Martin Meyers she wrote a series of historical mysteries about the Tonneman family from New Amsterdam in 1664 to New York City in 1895.
On her own she wrote two mysteries about a young woman poet set in 1920s Greenwich Village. In addition Meyers combined her Broadway experience with her Wall Street recruiting background to create Leslie Wetzon, a former Broadway dancer, and Xenia Smith from corporate human resources who together form an executive search firm slyly named Smith and Wetzon, specializing in the brokerage industry. They appeared in eight mysteries.
In their debut, The Big Killing (Bantam, 1989) Wetzon agrees to meet Barry Stark, a broker whom she’d interviewed years before and who had stayed in touch since then, for a drink. Stark sounded panicked on the phone, not his usual supremely confident self. He showed up with a black eye and bruised knuckles and in alarm told Wetzon that he had learned too much at his current brokerage and now someone was after him. Then he rushed off to make a telephone call. After Wetzon waited more than 30 minutes, she went to find him. He was still in a telephone booth and when she opened the door to speak to him, he fell over dead and she could see the knife in his chest.
Stark as it turned out had been working in a risky area of the stock market, one that promised the great profits he was after but just as easily could deliver significant losses. One of the trading firms with the same industry focus went under a couple of days after Stark’s murder. Wetzon had to wonder if there is a connection. As the police investigation continued, Stark’s friends and business associates pursued Wetzon, sometimes aggressively, confident she knew more than she was telling about his activities.
Wetzon is a warm likable character, Smith is by contrast a calculating piece of work. Both are credible and realistic. Meyers works colorful details about New York streets into the story and plenty of references to Broadway along with an informative primer in the stock market. By the time the second murder takes place, Wetzon’s Broadway friends are urging her to come back to the much safer show business world.
The resolution of the murders almost becomes secondary to the vivid description of the volatile nature of the executive placement industry. Brokers are always on the prowl for jobs with higher salaries, bigger bonuses, more perks, and they will change positions in an instant to get them. Smith and Wetzon earn their living by connecting these perpetual motion machines to brokerages who need their particular specialties and can pay enough to get them. One of the few drawbacks to the story is the mention of exact numbers in relation to salaries, bonuses, and profits, all of which need to be converted into present-day dollars to be meaningful.
An engrossing debut with an industry setting unlike any other I can recall. Crime fiction readers who like strong female leads will want to look at these books as will those who enjoy financially oriented mysteries.