Dust On the Nettles

Nick Kellaway runs a secretive hedge fund, based in offices in Mayfair and Geneva. He has grown rich through managing other people’s money in unconventional ways. In the summer of 2007, he sets detailed plans in place to profit from the gathering financial storm clouds as the global economy sinks into recession.

But Nick has never been quite allowed to forget the road not taken. Nor has he entirely forgotten Janice Day – supposedly killed in her youth – with whom he once dreamed of travelling that alternative road. On the evening of 25th July 2007, a phone call from a woman claiming to be her reawakens a concealed past that has never ceased to haunt Nick and now threatens to disrupt everything about the rich financier’s lifestyle he now lives.

Readers are taken on Nick’s troubled journey, from the revolutionary student politics of the 1960s and 70s – through rape, murder, espionage, financial scams and brushes with terrorism – to the great financial crisis of 2008. As his world is stripped bare, there is no place left to hide. Or is there?