In for a Ruble

Book 2: The Turbo Vlost Thrillers

by David Duffy

Genres: Thrillers; Private Investigators

Synopsis

A pulse-pounding mystery featuring Russian-American detective Turbo Vlost, the deadliest ex-KGB operative to ever hit New York

Turbo Vlost is back. He's depressed, drinking too much, and terrified that the love of his life is truly gone.

Hired to test the security of billionaire hedge fund manager Sebastian Leitz's computer system, Turbo finds himself peeling back the fetid layers of an immigrant family living the American dream while unable to escape mysterious and unspeakable demons.

Turbo isn't the only one interested in the Leitzs. The Belarus-based Baltic Enterprise Commission---a shadowy purveyor of online sleaze---has its claws in Leitz's brother-in-law. So, it appears, does Leitz's brother. And Leitz's son, a teenaged computer whiz, is running his own million-dollar schemes.

Thanks to his legwork and his partner's data-mining monster, Turbo can see all the cards. But to play the hand, he has to join the kind of game he recognizes from his childhood in the Gulag---one where the odds suddenly grow short and losers don't always come out alive.

David Duffy's In For a Ruble will enthrall fans of Martin Cruz Smith in this action-packed Turbo Vlost adventure.

Release date: July 17, 2012

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

CHAPTER 1


Everything about Sebastian Leitz was big. The man himself was six foot four and weighed two-eighty easy. A tractor tire wrapped his midsection, he wore size fourteen shoes, and nobody made gloves to fit his hands. The outsize head, with its fat pear nose, kidney-pool blue eyes and inflated inner-tube lips, made him seem larger still. The head was topped by a bushy, orange Afro that had last seen the barber when Brezhnev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A circus clown on steroids. His voice—a foghorn bass—could've filled a big top.
Leitz needed the big head to hold the brain. He'd earned two doctorates, mathematics and economics, from Harvard and MIT. He'd written countless papers and a half dozen books. He was a full professor at Columbia by twenty-six. People were talking Nobel Prize by thirty. That was before he quit academics and went to Wall Street to make big money.
Leitz was worth several billion, and he'd made it all himself—in little more than a decade. His hedge funds regularly ranked high on the performance charts, and Leitz himself consistently topped the compensation tables.
He had a blowback laugh and a blow-up temper. Both blew with the force of a saboteur's bomb—unseen, unexpected, until they knocked everybody in range off their feet. As I came to find out, not everyone got back up.
He had strong opinions and was willing to state them loudly and longly if he thought there was reason to do so. Otherwise he didn't waste breath. He ignored anyone he pegged as foolish or stupid. He didn't give a damn what they thought of him.
Leitz had a big penchant for secrecy. No one at his firm (other than himself, of course) was allowed to take anything home from the office. An idle comment in the elevator, if it involved the company's business, was a firing offense. He hated losing—big time. He was known to throw whatever was in reach at whomever put him on the wrong end of a trade. When I met him, he was working on the biggest deal of his life—buying and merging two of America's TV networks, thereby taking hold of a big chunk of the media landscape. His bid had dominated the financial press and the tabloids for weeks.
Leitz was a force of nature—one of those people God or whoever is in charge put here from time to time to shake things up, make life interesting. I suppose, despite everything, that's why I liked him. But all the size and smarts, money and privilege in the world are no guarantee you won't fuck it up.



Copyright © 2012 by David Duffy