FAILURE AT THE MISSION TRUST

“Ducker writes with sympathy and insight…A funny and knowing novel.”
—Booklist

“A humorous insider’s view of the world of banking and high finance [which] at the same time examines the inner world of human relationships and moral choices…A droll, snappily told yarn.”
—Rocky Mountain News

“Delicate, sensitive and conscientiously attuned to the way people live.”
—St. Louis Post Dispatch

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You can trust a banker with your money. Right? Even bankers start off believing that. But the pressures of making a killing erode the traditions of trust and make a banker a cohort of the hucksters with whom he has a shady deal and a promise of a quick killing. That’s when his ego gets involved, and he doesn’t want to appear to be a hick, behind the fast talk artists who are cleaning up on Wall Street.

Howard Adler, the hero of this cutting yet compassionate novel, has never given much thought to his own vulnerability. As a laconic, innocent loan officer at The Mission Trust, he becomes involved in the bogus scheme of Marty Luaughlin, a capitalist who is slowly raping the old staid bank.

Ducker’s expertise in these matters is enough to make Failure at the Mission Trust compelling reading for everyone interested in the moral decline of the finance businesses. But the deepest reward of its reading is in the writing, which is lucid and poignant as it relishes Adler’s nostalgia for a more honest age. It dramatizes Adler’s awareness of the corruption in which he has become entwined, and evokes heartbreak and a deeply compassionate picture of a man who suspects that his compromises may be with him for the rest of his life.