Bottom Line: A Novel
About this audiobook
As the US and global economies in the twenty-first century head toward a major recession and companies worldwide struggle to survive, one businessman is tempted to turn to crime.
Two strong businessmen who run a colossal international management consulting and accounting firm find themselves battling one another to save it, each proposing a different way of preventing its collapse. One is the CEO and founder, an amoral, ruthless megalomaniac; the other is the senior-most executive who expects to succeed the CEO as head of the company and a principled but flawed idealist. They were once as close as father and son, the older man mentor to the younger. Now their relationship collapses along with the economy, as their firm loses one blue-chip corporate client after another.
A series of financial crimes ensue, instigated by the CEO, who uses fraudulent accounting to appear to help clients make their estimated profits while using insider trading to reap millions in personal profits. With the end in sight, he absconds with millions of dollars that had been held in trust in a partners' bonus pool, forcing the younger man to hire a private eye to hunt him down.
About the author
Marc Davi s is the author of several children’s books and the novel Dirty Money, which was a finalist for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for best original PI paperback. He is a former commodity broker at the Chicago Board of Trade and former newspaper reporter whose local history column, Yesterday, ran for more than five years in the Chicago Tribune. A freelance journalist, his articles have been published in national print and online periodicals and on the Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins University consumer websites. He is also an award-winning painter and art teacher.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto... with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.
