Wall Street banking whiz John Putman Thatcher finds himself involved in corporate corruption and mystery involving an assistant division manager, an executive vice-president, and a corporate wife The pseudonymous pair known as Emma Lathen slide with practiced ease into another Wall Street mystery featuring banker John Thatcher of Sloan Guaranty Trust. When a Princeton manufacturing firm represented by a sister bank targets a Sloan family-owned business client for takeover, Thatcher monitors the ensuing negotiations. Friction erupts into fracas, however, when rumors fly, financial records burn, and possible industrial sabotage culminates in murder. Smoothly done, well put together, and very appealing: just as the title indicates. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. A merger between private-label manufacturer Aqua Supplies, Inc. (ASI), and the Ecker Company, a mom-and-pop client of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, whose main asset is pop Conrad Ecker's uncanny knack for developing small kitchen appliances, is threatened by a suspicious fire in Ecker's record room--and then by meddlesome ASI underling Victor Hunnicut, whose paranoid determination to scuttle the merger ends only when he's skewered during a Manhattan trade show. The police start by going after Conrad's slow-horse production manager, Bob Laverdiere, whose wife Tina had overseen the books that were toasted, and then, finding no flaw in Ecker's finances, they focus on the nervous upper echelons at ASI--but it naturally takes the Sloan's genial veteran John Putnam Thatcher to spot the cleverly concealed culprit. Not as high-concept as Thatcher's recent outings (East is East, 1991, etc.), but with more memorable characters and counterplots. Above average for this blue-chip series. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Used Book in Good Condition