[The Landau Trilogy 01] • The Hedge Fund

THE HEDGE FUND - WHERE BLOOD MEETS MONEY Since 1959 Fidel Castro's Cuba has struggled along ninety miles off the coast of Florida, treated alternately as a threat and an economic basket case by the American colossus to its north. Several generations of immigrants, mostly from Havana, have all but taken over Miami and found their way quickly into political and financial power throughout much of the American establishment. The Hedge Fund deals imaginatively with how all this plays out when the boisterous daughter of a wealthy, established St. Petersburg family, the Landaus, marries the son of a ruthless, upward-striving Cuban financier whose overnight rise depends on his connection to the Trafficante wing of the surviving Cosa Nostra. The patriarch of the St. Petersburg contingent, Sylvan Landau, is a witty, mordant Jewish savant and economist in his mid-sixties who settled years before in Florida to try and improve the health of his aristocratic wife, Louisa - Weezee - the flower of a decayed Philadelphia Main Line family. Through investments, largely in local up-market real estate, Sylvan has compounded the family holdings into a fortune and ridden up the local boom. When his new son-in-law's father, Ramon Perez y Cruz, presents Sylvan with the chance to in effect mortgage most of his better properties to a hedge fund the Cuban has established and cash in on a vast position in beach properties on the island of Cuba itself now that Castro is relinquishing his grip, Sylvan cannot resist. Sylvan's son and the narrator for the novel, Michael, a lawyer in his early thirties who has grown up in his father's shadow, is dubious from the start. He is the first to realize that once real estate starts to slide off by 2008 his family could lose everything they have in the imminent debacle. Before long Michael recruits the rangy brother of his Comanche lover, Linda. A seasoned military scout, Sonny directs a night raid on Ramon's offices to recover crucial paperwork. Michael finally manages to extract the Landau properties from the Hedge Fund through a legal maneuver; then he and Sylvan find themselves under attack during a boat ride in the Everglades and very nearly machine-gunned to death. Michael has discovered that Ramon has been smuggling assets out of Cuba for the deteriorating Castro directorate; word leaks; before long both the Castroite hard-liners and the Trafficante backers of Ramon are gunning for Ramon. The novel culminates in the landmark National Hotel in Havana, where all the forces close in and the powerful denouement unfolds.