The Underwriting

March 23, 2015
Todd Kent is a high-powered Wall Street Millenial who thrives on large deals and casual sexual encounters. When he’s asked by Josh Hart, CEO of online dating app Hook, to take his company public, he leaps at the chance. Todd brings in a small team to execute the billion-dollar deal, but quickly they all realize that they have different goals and desires—and that the deal itself is brimming with intrigue and secrets. As the deal moves forward, people around it start to draw connections between the drug-related death of an undergraduate and the application, and it becomes clear that someone used Hook to cover up a murder. As they race to complete the IPO before anyone finds out, Todd and his team find out who is willing to risk everything for this deal. This taut thriller does combine the best of Millenial technologies and Wall Street greed, but it tries to be too many things to too many people. While readers will quickly discover that most of the characters aren’t likable, they will want to find out what happens in the story. That said, it ends on a clumsy cliffhanger, leaving readers confused as to whether there is a next installment. There could be—Miller, who worked at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, does an excellent job and leaves readers interested in what happens next. Readers, especially ones of an age with the characters, will find this a quick, entertaining read.

March 15, 2015
A bunch of emotionally and morally stunted millennials run into trouble when they try to take a questionable dating app public. Full of insider details and industry jargon from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, Miller's debut novel is a seductive romp through the complicated $14 billion IPO of a startup called Hook, a dating app in which users give each other ratings and are evaluated according to a "cumulative Hook score." The app has more than 500 million users, and ambitious CFO Nick Winthrop thinks a public offering could put him "on the precipice of becoming one of the world's great leaders," but first he has to convince CEO Josh Hart, a computer science nerd who hates Wall Street. Josh agrees but asks Nick's Stanford nemesis, Todd Kent, an associate at the investment bank L. Cecil, to oversee the deal. Todd assembles a team at L. Cecil that includes Tara Taylor, an old crush from Stanford and one of the youngest vice presidents in Equity Capital Markets, frumpy analyst Neha Patel, and the lazy but well-connected Beau Buckley. The plot takes a surprising and absorbing turn when Stanford senior, Hook user, and former L. Cecil intern Kelly Jacobson dies of a drug overdose under mysterious circumstances. As Hook programmer Juan Ramirez discovers incriminating user data from the night she died, the team may have to make some tough moral choices. Told from many different points of view, the book is somewhat overpopulated with major characters. While some of the scenes and characters feel cliched, others are intelligently observed, with fresh, well-paced dialogue in which characters deliver lines like, "There's a difference between unemotional sex that's respectful and transactional sex that's orchestrated by an app." The central mystery and the fun of watching the deal unravel drive the narrative forward, allowing just the right number of characters to develop a conscience. A more intricate Devil Wears Prada for the tech generation.