Thrillers and Non-fiction by Linda DaviesYou can bank on thrills when the worlds of international finance and espionage collide in the novels of Linda Davies, former New York & London banker!Home page of the novelist maintained by her brother, Roy Davies. My sister now has her
own offical Linda Davies website.
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| Ark Storm | Wilderness of Mirrors | Nest of Vipers | Something Wild | Into the Fire | Final Settlement | ||
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Ebooks
Most of Linda's books are now also available as ebooks from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk etc. in Amazon's Kindle format, and from other suppliers in the Epub format for the Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo Reader etc.
Non-fictionFinancial Literacy 10 Things Everyone Needs to Know About Money Linda discusses what money really is, how global financial systems impact our everyday lives, what we can do about it and how we can bolster our financial resilience. In short, she explains how to master money so it does not master us. The book is illustrated with drawings by Nick Bashall who made is reputation as a war artist.
Linda Davies and Nick Bashall will be speaking about this subject at the Hay Book Festival on Saturday 28 May 2022, at 5.30pm. The full story of this international incident has now been described in the book Kidnapped: the true story of my captivity in Iran which is available from the usual sources such as Amazon as a paperback or as an ebook. The book describes how Linda was on the maiden voyage of her new catamaran alongside her husband when the boat’s Australian captain unknowingly sailed into sharply contested waters off the coast of Iran. Within minutes, a dozen heavily armed Iranian marines stormed the boat and took them prisoner. Over the next two weeks, Linda was held hostage by one of the most feared regimes in the world, separated from her three young children, terrified for her life, with no reason to expect anything but the worst. Linda, her husband, and the Australian sailor were finally released on 11 November 2005 after strenuous secret efforts by the British Foreign Office and the Australian Government. For more information see the reports below. This incident took place 16 months before a group of 15 British sailors and Royal Marines were seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in gunboats. History repeats itself. In November 2009 five British yachtsmen sailing from Bahrain to Dubai were arrested by Iranian naval vessels. Such incidents also cast doubt on plans to hold the 33rd America's Cup off the coast of Ras al-Khaimah, another of the Emirates in the United Arab Emirates, but, after a legal dispute for other reasons it was held instead in Valencia in Spain.
Fantasy NovelsLongbow Girl - a novel featuring a lost tale from the Mabinogion Longbow Girl is a story set in the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains of Wales. The accidental discovery of an acient manuscript offers a way out of a dilemma caused by a centuries old feud dating back to the Battle of Crecy - but only if Merry Owen, the Longbow Girl, is prepared to embark on an adventure that will imperil her life and, indirectly, that of her boyfriend. Longbow Girl is published by Chicken House. The Battle of Crecy was not the only great battle in which the Anglo-Welsh longbow proved decisive. The 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt fell on 25 October 2015 and to mark the occasion Linda Davies wrote an article in the online version of the Guardian newspaper on Why the Battle of Agincourt is still important today. She also spoke about Agincourt on ITV's News at Ten on 29 October 2015. Linda also spoke about Longbow Girl at the Hay-on-Wye Winter Festival on 28 November 2015. The Djinn series of Fantasy Books
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Financial ThrillersArk StormWhen Gwen Boudain, a meteorologist who has developed a method of predicting el Niños, joins Falcon Capital, a firm owned by a Middle Eastern Sheikh, she does not realise that she will be supplying the missing piece in a terrorist plot to unleash a devastating Ark Storm causing floods that would do hundreds of billion dollars worth of damage to California. The only people in a position to thwart the plot are Gwen herself and Dan Jacobsen, a reporter and former US Navy SEAL. Into the FireA young derivatives trader suspected of fraud flees to Peru only to find herself facing much greater unknown and unexpected perils. The action ranges from the peaks of the banking world to the Andes, from the financial jungle of the City of London to the real, Amazonian jungle, and back again. A new edition has been published by Twenty First Century Publishers. Final SettlementA New England heiress whose life revolves around art and sailing marries an architect whose mother, in her youth, had posed as a model for many famous artists. Together they start to do up a ruined Scottish castle but, after a near-fatal car accident, the young American woman loses her memory. As she slowly recovers, she gradually becomes aware of what else she is in danger of losing. The hardback came out in the UK in 2007 and is available worldwide. The paperback had already been published in Canada. Nest of VipersSarah Jensen, a brilliant and beautiful foreign exchange dealer, becomes an undercover agent to investigate an apparently straightforward case of insider trading and gets caught up in a much wider international financial conspiracy affecting the operations of the central banks of the G7 nations, which imperils her life. Wilderness of MirrorsThe international diamond business forms a cover for the activities of the secret services as two women, one an undercover agent and former junkie, the other a venture capitalist, set out to trap a businessman at the heart of a twisted maze of drug and arms smuggling by luring him into a deal to raise finance for a mine to exploit a discovery of diamonds at a remote location in Vietnam. Something WildRock and Roll meets banking when Sarah Jensen, the heroine of Nest of Vipers, tries to negotiate the world's biggest Bowie bond issue as she trails one of the greatest stars of the music business from his Rocky Mountain ranch to London via Venice - and discovers that the $100 million deal at stake is the least of the risks she is running. Foreign TranslationsClick on the links to the books above for information including details of foreign language editions. LecturePsychology of Risk, Speculation and FraudText of a speech at a conference on European Monetary Union. ReviewsQuotations from the press and other media. Ordering BooksBibliographic details and links to online book shops. |
The Making of an AuthorClick for Full Biography "The scope for crime was immense. I sat down one day and wondered what would be the biggest, most spectacular crime that could be committed. I tried to think like a criminal. How would I make a fortune? How could I bridge the gap between the City and the world at large off which it feeds?"One afternoon, in July 1991, Linda Davies asked herself those questions and they led her to think of the perfect crime and to start writing. "I didn't want to write about a parochial insider trading case. I wanted to show the links between governments and central banks and the City, and the role that the intelligence services now have in business and finance. The City is a perfect cover for spies." The result was Nest of Vipers, a novel whose main theme was confirmed by subsequent events, including the revelation in February 2005 that 12 years earlier MI6 had provided the British government with secret advance information about French interest rate movements. Following her successful debut, Linda travelled to Hong Kong and Vietnam to do research for her second novel, Wilderness of Mirrors, which deals not only with the intelligence services and the financial world but also the diamond industry and the international drugs trade. While she was finishing writing the book her life took another sudden change of course. She met Rupert Wise, a banker, and a few months later got married and moved to Peru where the people they came into contact with ranged from the political leaders of the country to gunmen who fought a battle around their house! "Then the shooting got closer and closer. It reached our garden and the alarm went off. I was terrified when Rupert grabbed his pistol and went outside. I was charging around the house with a kitchen knife, scared to death the gunmen were going to come through the glass frontage of our modern house. I hugged the walls trying to avoid whatever the hell was going on. I rang our bodyguard on the inter-com, but he did not respond. As far as I was concerned, both he and my husband had been shot."Actually they survived, help arrived and the attackers were driven off. The only lasting legacy of the experience is the inspiration it provided for one of the key chapters of Into the Fire. Linda and Rupert's other experiences of Peru, including much happier ones such as as hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, are also reflected in the book, which also deals with the very different world of the derivatives market. "There was nothing familiar of friendly about the derivatives market. It could rip your guts out overnight, as it had done to Barings, when a lone trader built up a derivatives loss of seven hundred and forty million pounds, breaking the bank. Derivatives were the biggest, most potentially lucrative, and destructive market in the world." Quotation from Into the Fire. After three years in Peru Linda returned to London and wrote Something Wild, the first novel to deal with the subject of Bowie bonds. It was highly praised by David Pullman, the American banker who was responsible for the original, epoch making deal with David Bowie and most subsequent similar deals with other stars. At the end of 2004 Linda and her husband and family moved to Dubai. Her fifth book, Final Settlement came out in Britain in the spring of 2007. It came out in paperback in Canada over a year earlier. A large part of it is set in the north of Scotland (Linda was born in Scotland and loves the Highlands), and part is set on the coast of New England, an area she has got to know well more recently. A new development in her writing career was the publication of a novel for children, Sea Djinn by the Dubai-based publisher Jerboa Books. It was the first of the Djinn series of four books inspired by the Arabian Peninsula. In 2012 Linda and her husband and children left Dubai and moved back to Britain. Since then she has written Ark Storm, a thriller set on the west coast of the United States but inspired by experiments in weather modification that took place when she was living in the Middle East. She also wrote Hostage, the full account of how she and her husband came to be taken prisoner by the Iranian Navy, and Ark Storm and Hostage were both published in the summer of 2014. Linda Davies is the daughter of Professor Glyn Davies, the author of A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day, which is the standard work in its field. For more information about Linda Davies including links to other sites carrying interviews with her or articles about her, read the full biography. |
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