The
Phoenix Year
David
Blond
Genre:
thriller
Publisher:
Wattle Publishing
Date
of Publication: 2014
Number
of pages: 332
Word
Count: approx. 125,000
Book
Description:
“… from
out of the fire, would rise a new order, like the legend of the
phoenix.
There
would emerge a new world, a new super economy…”
So
starts a sequence of events destined to rock world economies to their
very core. On the 50th anniversary of their induction into the
Society of the Phoenix, a group of billionaires is about to change
the world dramatically, with devastating effect.
Overseen
by the reclusive Heinrich Von Kleise, the Society has hatched an
audacious plan to subvert world economies, by using and abusing some
of the world’s wealthiest businessmen and their families; in some
cases, holding them literally to ransom, or worse.
Michael
Ross, an economic advisor to the US President, Ben Masters, a
disgraced property tycoon, Natalya Avramowitz, a Russian economist
and spy, and “Kim” a CIA Agent, find themselves at the center of
this plot, involving inside trading, sex slavery, and political
corruption.
As
the world careens towards financial Armageddon, can Michael, Natalya
and Kim prevent global disintegration, or are the world’s financial
institutions fated to implode?
The
Phoenix Year by David L. Blond is a gripping novel, encompassing many
of the financial crises that have hit the headlines in the past
decade. The author has skillfully woven these together to create an
action-packed conspiracy thriller.
About
the Author:
Dr.
David L. Blond works as a private economic consultant specializing in
quantitative analysis of economic data. He began his career working
for the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. During the period of
1978 – 1985, he was a Senior Economist in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense in Washington, and after leaving that position
worked for various major global economic forecasting and consulting
firms in senior positions. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Interview
– 1
What makes The
Phoenix Year unique?
It is a love story set in our times. The
events of the past few years—starting with the Dot-com bubble burst and 9/11
through the financial recession to today’s volatile stock market and collapsing
oil prices – are all part of the underlying story of the book. At the same time
it deals with real people who recognize that whatever has happened in the past
few years with the millions made homeless and millions losing their jobs and
homes is nothing compared to what is planned by a group of wealthy, seemingly altruistic
billionaires who set out to change the world by setting a tsunami to destroy
Wall Street oriented managerial capitalism. What they do to try to stop what
will be worse coming and how they must come to grips with the fact that they
alone can’t stop the inevitable but must try to live with it and use it for
food is the heart and soul of the story. In the end, really, I wrote it as a
love story between two people who come from very different worlds but find
redemption in working together.
Tell us a little bit about your main characters
The
Phoenix Year is a love
story set in turbulent economic times where the main characters are forced to
come to terms with the their own past lives – Michael had inadvertently set in
motion the events that lead to the collapse of the global market at the end of
the first book; Natalya had to face the fact that she had been used badly by
her father for his own purposes leaving with a divided loyalty to the America
she loved and the Russia of her birth; Kim had to deal with the damage done
when she was a prostitute in Bangkok as she investigated the links between
kidnapped children of executives providing inside information to some shadowy
conspiracy; Ben and Lilly Masters and their wayward daughter Beth faced the fact
that they did once truly love each other when all the cards were dealt against
them sending them from the heights of the New York society to the lowest depths
which anyone can fall.
Describe your ideal writing spot.
I write fiction for relaxation. Much of
my work involves building and analyzing large scale multi-product,
multi-country data sets and trying to understand the how they fit together. I
find if I can alternate while I thinking, plot lines and character development
it is relaxing. So I usually keep open several windows on my computer to allow
me to move from sometimes rather difficult economic analyses to the world of
fiction were I can be in control of scene, plot, and character
development.
How do you keep busy when not writing?
I own and manage a well-regarded global
economic practice involving working with large scale models and data bases
combining information from clients with data developed by international
organizations. I also work on complex consulting projects for clients throughout
the world.
If you could have any superhuman ability, what
would you choose and why?
To change and influence minds that are
made up. A superhero who need not fight because he can turn a villain into a
saint would be the most powerful superhero of all times.
Why should readers of thrillers and general
fiction pick up The Phoenix Year? People relate to thrillers because it
offers escape into a world that is mainly fantasy. But the economic events that
have changed people’s lives since the collapse in 2008 are real events. The
Phoenix Year is a thriller that I believe everyone can understand for the
consequences are often times far more damaging to futures that some global
cataclysm averted. It has all the elements of a thriller – a potent love
story between two different people, secret agents, sexual enslavement, insider
trading, financial manipulations that will lead to damaging global prosperity,
a storyline that races from Thailand to the heights of the Alps, but unlike
most thrillers, the heroes, at least in the first novel of the trilogy, can’t
stop the disaster that was started by the conspirators from unfolding as
planned. Instead they must try to ride the tiger until they can use the
power obtained to try to turn what is a negative – a sudden, total, collapse of
world stock exchanges with the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth -- into a
positive for the world economy.
You specialize in economics in your day job. Was
this the inspiration for the book?
Yes, economics is the driving force for
the world. It impacts everyone. Explaining what happened starting really
in 2001 with the collapse of the Dot-com bubble and the terrorist attacks of
September 11th in terms that everyone can understand without being
pedantic. There is a serious malaise that is gripping the world as if all the
issues that from global climate change to poverty and stagnation have become
obvious and unsolvable. There are solutions and it provides at least one
possible path that may turn the negatives that end the first volume into
positives that allow the human race to survive and prosper in the 21st
century and beyond.
Is there a message in your novel that you want
readers to grasp?
I hope the reader
takes away aside from a good story and interesting characters that the book has
a message and a goal. It is the first of two additional parts explaining how it
might be possible to solve some of the pressing problems that come from the
style of capitalism that has been practiced during the second half of the
twentieth century. Capitalism defined by short-term goals to meet profit
targets tends to create the paradox – strong profits combined with weak
economic growth, high rates of unemployment, stagnant wages, and a growing
divide between the 1% and the 99%. If not changed and altered, then it leads to
economic stagnation or worse social revolution. The members of the Society of
the Phoenix set out to destroy Wall Street capitalism because they saw it as
the only way to break the cycle. Michael and Natalya, as the reluctant heirs,
must turn their flawed vision into a reality if only to stop the global economy
from totally collapsing. The last time that happened 50 million people were
killed as nations went to war for social and economic supremacy in 1939.
What books have influenced your life most?
Atlas Shrugged was a major
influence, not because I liked the principle of greed and self-interest as the
only noble sentiments for rich and poor alike, but because Ayn Rand was an
amazing story teller. She made you feel the depression and the
hopelessness of the main characters. You could even root for John Galt and the
other “industrialists” returning to save the world from their retreat in Happy
Valley.
If you had to choose, which writer would you
consider a mentor?
I’ve read a
number of books by Mark Helprin and especially loved In Sunlight and
Shadow. If I could learn to craft fiction with the care for
dialogue, story and words, beautiful words, then I would become a far better
writer. So If I could ask for a mentor, it would be him.
Where
are you from?
I grew up in Washington, D.C., did
graduate study in economics in New York, worked in Switzerland, and later
returned to Washington where I worked first as the Senior Economist at the
Pentagon, and later as a private consultant in Washington, D.C. I now
manage my own consulting company out of a home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
What book are you reading now?
Paul Erdman’s The Crash of ’79
which was published in 1976. I met Paul and his wife Heidi in England when I
was on my honeymoon just after he had managed to get out of a Swiss jail where
he was accused of bank fraud when his Basel based bank failed under the weight
of trying to corner the cocoa market. The earliest version of my own book
started while in Switzerland when I worked for the United Nations (1974 –
1978). As a read for the first time The Crash of 1979, I see that my own
style is more about character development around a global conspiracy plot
theme. What is interesting is that much of what Erdman wrote and published in
1976 involving Iranian nuclear weapons is the stuff of everyday life today. In
Erdman’s book it is the Shah of Iran who acquires nuclear weapons rather than
the Revolutionary Government of Iran. Erdman’s book also involved asking questions
about how long capitalism as it existed back in the 1970’s could long endure.
Twitter:
@davidblond2000
Publisher
Twitter: @wattlepub
Wattle
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https://www.facebook.com/WattlePublishing?sk=app_190322544333196
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