The Bernie Madoff affair provides the inspiration for this stand-alone thriller from James Grippando. Abe Cushman sets up a sixty-billion dollar Ponzi scheme and then commits suicide, taking all the gritty details of the scam to his grave.

Patrick Lloyd, a Wall Street advisor at the world’s largest Swiss bank, gets involved in the mess when his former girlfriend is connected to the electronic transfer of at least two billion dollars of the missing money to Cushman’s partner.

When Gerry Collins, Cushman’s fellow schemer, is killed, it appears some very powerful and nasty folks are not happy about losing their money. Now it gets complicated with Lloyd and his former sweetie, Lilly, the new targets of the bad guys. The couple decide they better figure out what’s going on and where they money has gone before they end up dead.

A gripping, fast-paced, topical story based on recent financial shenanigans on Wall Street, Need You Now touches upon a number of issues raised by the Madoff case and its aftermath. Why did certain individuals apparently “smell a rat” and see a problem but never blow the whistle on Madoff? Was that scenario just” collateral damage” from a much larger and complex financial mess that powerful people didn’t want aired?

As you read this riveting novel, you’ll wonder why whistleblowers were ignored, why the red flags were overlooked, and who in our government might have known there was something very, very amiss with Mr. Madoff’s business operations but chose to look the other way.