My name is Norb Vonnegut, and I’m a novelist and a blogger. But it wasn’t always that way. Before writing financial thrillers, I built a career in private wealth management at Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber, and other iconic Wall Street institutions.
Full disclosure: I find the people of Wall Street, their quirks and their edgy sense of humor, every bit as interesting as the securities they invent. After evaluating investments for two decades, I traded day-to-day money management for writing about people in the trenches of finance. Brokers. Traders. Sales Assistants.
Top Producer tells the story of Grove O’Rourke, a stockbroker and a good guy who keeps his head down and tries to do the right thing for his clients. You’ll find love, anger, and revenge—a scatter of emotions from everyday life—as you venture into my fictional world of big money and hijinks on Wall Street. I think you’ll care about Grove, whose life spirals out of control through no fault of his own. Publishers Weekly gave Top Producer, my first novel, a starred review. And you may be surprised that I sold Top Producer to St. Martin's Press one year before.... Well, you'll see.
The Fund, a working title for my next thriller, is scheduled to print in the winter of 2010/2011. Jimmy Cusack is the hero. He’s a guy who runs into big trouble when he joins a Greenwich hedge fund during the dog days of 2008. I hope you keep visiting my website. Sometime during 2010, I’ll explain why the name, Jimmy Cusack, is so important.
Acrimoney is my blog about the wild, wild world of wealth. Posts describe the culture of finance, with original and sometimes irreverent commentary about people who manage money or affect it through their political power. As an ex-Wall Street stockbroker, I bring an insider’s insight into the way financial advisers behave. Acrimoney is where I write about Wall Street from a non-fiction perspective, about fact stranger than fiction, about stories that make you scratch your head and think:
You can’t make this stuff up.
I graduated from Phillips Exeter in 1976, Harvard College in 1980 and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1986. The diplomas make me sound like a member of New England's elite. But nothing is further from the truth. I grew up in a military family and spent my formative years in the Catholic schools of Charleston, SC.
