Saturday, December 29, 2018

Mount TBR #37


I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Green Grow the Dollars - Emma Lathen

Unlike Japan where it is a popular genre, the business novel hasn’t had a happy history in the US. Office life in skewered in Something Happened by Joseph Heller and the moral emptiness of fortune and success is examined in The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. Thank heaven for Emma Lathen mysteries where the business world is treated as a place natural for a range of creativity and ingenuity, quarreling and back-stabbing to unfold.

The Vandam Nursery and Seed Company, the world's largest mail-order nursery business, is charged by an independent lab with theft of intellectual property, in this case a newly developed tomato, a biennial that produces for six months. A murder occurs, and John Putnam Thatcher must identify the perp. Our series hero Thatcher is a Wall Street banker who has rare understanding of both people and money.

The unique charm of Lathen mysteries is that they are comedies of manners disguised as mysteries. The books detail distinctive worlds such as real estate, the auto industry, or the garment industry. The settings are New York City, the Midwest, Puerto Rico, and Japan. The casts are various too: members of family business at each other’s throats, venal scientists and product developers, and Thatcher’s stand-bys such as his canny PA the no-nonsense Miss Corsa. Lathen is not above mildly satirizing the customers of mail-order nurseries, such as gardeners who survive northern winters only by looking through seed catalogs and swearing that this year, the garden will be great.

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