The Beginning of the most corrupt decade in the history of Wall Street was a good time to steal a little bit of money from a lot of people. Frank McGinley, a trading floor specialist with a fondness for vodka, uncovers a scam to skim money from traders accounts and accepts forty grand to look the other way. He has no idea he’s landed in the middle of an ongoing federal investigation of a Ponzi schemer turned violent. The Vig is the story about the seamy side of Wall Street rarely seen by the public. Deals are made on a barstool not a boardroom. They’re sealed with a handshake and broken with a fist-or sometimes a gun. To stay alive, Frank will have make a deal with the Feds, survive torture from a beautiful assasin, and outwit a criminal mastermind who has left a trail of bodies behind him for twenty years.

John Nuckel has written an engaging thriller that gives a glimpse into the Street from a trader’s perspective. While not set entirely on Wall Street, the novel shines in those scenes, with in-your-face dialog and characters that put you on the trading floor and inside the heads of its personalities. To an extent, he’s writing about a bygone era–the American Stock Exchange, for example, is no more–but the story doesn’t suffer from that fact.

The plot will hold your interest and keep you turning pages, but it’s his characters and their development, and not just the Wall Street ones, that make John’s writing pop. No knowledge of finance is necessary to enjoy this book. It’s a thriller first, and a Wall Street book second, so don’t be put off if you can’t add without a calculator. You’ll still enjoy The Vig.

This novel was written by a true Wall Street insider. A former trading floor broker, equity option specialist and managing partner of a risk arbitrage firm. He’s known hedge fund managers and wise guys and the simple truth is, there isn’t much difference between them. The two may never cross paths but they cling to the same truth: the money is made in the Vig.