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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