Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel

About the book

Broker Jim Randolph receives urgent word that his friend Bob Brownley is driving a market collapse. The immediate emergency sends the narrative backward to explain how a gifted young financier became capable of such destructive action. Central to that history is Beulah Sands, who seeks help after financial disaster threatens her family. Brownley's involvement turns the mechanisms of speculation into matters of personal hope, loyalty, and anger. Thomas W. Lawson writes with a financier's interest in the exchange and a melodramatist's appetite for sharply concentrated stakes. The novel treats market movements as events capable of ruining lives far from the trading floor, linking the language of prices and orders to an increasingly volatile emotional drama.

• Speculation and power
• Financial ruin
• Love and vengeance

Why read it

Experience an early financial thriller that turns stock-market operations into the machinery of personal catastrophe.

English text of Thomas W. Lawson's 1907 novel