Set in the New York Stock Exchange world of love, adultery, high finance, and betrayal, presents a character study of a Wall Street man who embezzles money during the Depression.

A bank employee’s wife teams up with his boss—with fatal results—in this noir novella by the legendary author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Despite an ulcer that requires surgery, workaholic Charles Brent doesn’t want to take time off from his job as a head teller at the bank. What eventually convinces him to give in and take a break is the prospect of his young wife, Sheila, temporarily taking over his responsibilities. Then, in Charles’s absence, his wife and his boss discover the embezzlement he’s been hiding—and the reason behind it. But instead of reporting Charles, the two form a pact . . . Originally published under the title Money and the Woman, The Embezzler is a standout novella from James M. Cain, celebrated crime writer and master of the noir thriller. “James M. Cain is one novelist who has something to teach just about any writer, and delight just about any reader.” —Anne Rice, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Interview with a Vampire “One of the greats of American noir.” —The Guardian

Three powerful men converge on the banks of the Red Cedar River in the early 1900s in southern Minnesota—George Albert Hormel, founder of what will become the $10 billion food conglomerate Hormel Foods; Alpha LaRue Eberhart, the author’s paternal grandfather and Hormel’s Executive Vice President and Corporate Secretary; and Ransome Josiah Thomson, Hormel’s comptroller. Over ten years, Thomson will embezzle $1.2 million from the company’s coffers, nearly bringing the company to its knees. The Butcher, The Embezzler, and The Fall Guy opens in 1922 as George Hormel calls Eberhart into his office and demands his resignation. Hailed as the true leader of the company he’d helped Hormel build—is Eberhart complicit in the embezzlement? Far worse than losing his job and the great wealth he’d rightfully accumulated is that his beloved young wife, Lena, is dying while their three children grieve alongside. Of course, his story doesn’t end there. In scale both intimate and grand, Cherington deftly weaves the histories of Hormel, Eberhart, and Thomson within the sweeping landscape of our country’s early industries, along with keen observations about business leaders gleaned from her thirty-five-year career advising top company executives. The Butcher, The Embezzler, and The Fall Guy equally chronicles Cherington’s journey from blind faith in family lore to a nuanced consideration of the three men’s great strengths and flaws—and a multilayered, thoughtful exploration of the ways we all must contend with the mythology of powerful men, our reverence for heroes, and the legacy of a complicated past.

When Armani Vasquez is ripped off by her financial advisor, she recruits her good friend (and occasional assassin) Maggie Lee, to help her track him down. Piling into Armani’s RV with a know-it-all lizard, an airhead Doberman pinscher, a one-eyed cat, a nervous mouse (and an unexpected stowaway) Maggie and Armani embark on an adventure to recover Armani’s money and bring the embezzler to justice. What could go wrong?

Using recent research and case studies, this book offers an evidence-based insight into the embezzler’s mindset as they commit crimes that are costing nations, organisations and individuals increasingly more each year. This mindset is described in detail as the embezzler develops their motivation to steal from their employer, finds a method of stealing, assesses the risks, executes the theft, and then determines whether to continue to steal. The organisational landscape of security capabilities, culture and financial circumstances provide the environment that this mindset operates within. The embezzler’s approach to the crime is broken down into four stages: Pre-Existing Vulnerabilities, Induction to First Theft, Ongoing Theft and Detection to Resolution. The author recommends strategies based on the embezzler’s mindset for organisations to enhance their ability to protect themselves from such inside threats that attack their reputation, productivity, morale and, in the worst cases, financial viability.

At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.