"The Magazine" reveals skulduggery at a magazine

Kasia Moreno and her husband Hugo each have a couple decades of experience working at financial magazines such as Forbes and SmartMoney. (I'm quoting their book's biographical note; my fact-checking staff is on vacation this week.) With that background, they apparently thought, why not write a revenge thriller in which virtually all the main characters are connected to a financial magazine that is arrogant enough to call itself The Magazine?

The Morenos' novel, titled The Magazine, begins with a change at the top of the magazine's masthead on June 13, 1997. (The chapters are all dated to help readers keep track of the pell mell activity; the book ends on October 9, 1999.) The editor-in-chief is stepping down and, to select a replacement, he asks each of four candidates on the staff to come up with an outstanding story and may the best reporter win.

Rebecca, one of the candidates, sniffs out a potential blockbuster and works flat out for more than a week, ignoring sleep, ignoring food, barely drinking enough liquid to remain functional, and ignoring her widowed father's phone messages. (He's gregarious; she's focused on her story.)

At the end of the editorial competition she learns the fix was in from the beginning. The outgoing editor had chosen a successor before the contest but used it to spur the four reporters to outdo themselves for the next issue. Rebecca gets more bad news: Her beloved father had been one of many terminated at his long-time employer after Tom Richardson, a billionaire hedge-fund manager bought the company. The father who'd been trying to reach his daughter all week to tell her he'd lost the job he loved terminated himself by jumping off the company's roof. Rebecca. shattered, quits The Magazine to work for its competition.

Tom Richardson is handsome, middle-aged, wealthy, and currently single. Twenty years earlier at Yale he had an affair with an Africa-American fellow student that  resulted in a daughter, Kimmie. Richardson supported Kimmie and her mother but had no contact with the girl who, early in the book, shows up at his Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment. Kimmie, after a stint at Morgan-Stanley, obtains a reporting job at The Magazine. 

The book's fourth main character is Helen who, when she isn't named editor-in-chief, apparently becomes The Magazine's managing editor. She meets Richardson, they fall in love, and he asks her to marry him.

So, the pieces are on the board and the game's underway: Rebecca wants to avenge her father's suicide by destroying the man who inadvertently (indeed, unknowingly) caused it: Tom Richardson. Kimmie wants to punish her father for his years of neglect. Helen wants to protect her finance.

Because the Morenos are writing from the inside, virtually all of the information about financial reporting and life on a national magazine ring true: how you find stories, relationship with sources, editorial idiosyncrasies (I myself had an editor who made changes at the last moment just because he could), and more. And because the book is set at the end of the 1990s, The Magazine's publisher does not yet have to lose sleep over the internet and what it is going to do to advertising and circulation.

The novel does raise a question: What is the point of it all? The Magazine's readers are, presumably, looking for an edge. an insight that a skilled reporter can tease out of SEC filings, analysts' reports, hints, and rumors. With the insight investors can confidently buy more stock, sell what they have, or short it in the expectation the price will drop. But how, the disinterested reader might ask, does this add to the country's wealth? It doesn't add to the country's stock of scientific or technological knowledge. It doesn't build a house, school, hospital, bridge, transportation system, or anything else. But that's a subject for another book.

The Magazine held my interest all the way through and not only because I have a background in magazine publishing myself. By the time I began to be less willing suspend my disbelief in the Morenos' complex plot I was hooked. How do you destroy a billionaire who can (and does) recruit one of the best private detectives in New York City and has an army of lawyers? How does a crack reporter protect her story from another crack reporter? How do you booby trap a loft apartment with nothing more than a screwdriver? Read—and enjoy—The Magazine to find out.