The Last Adviser

Adam Halsey built one of Boston's most trusted wealth firms out of two rooms over a bank and a phone call he made in the worst week of 1987. Forty years later, with four point two billion dollars and fourteen families in his care, he has six months to choose who runs it next, and a diagnosis he has told no one.

He has good hours inside bad days. He has a wife who has been keeping a quiet record since the winter, a daughter who runs the firm's conscience two floors down and never wanted the chair, a head of investments who is already being courted by a rival, and a chief of staff who knows the clients better than the partners do. He has a largest client who tests him weekly, a compliance officer who has begun to ask why he repeats himself, and a small book of old accounts that the next person will be tempted to dismantle, and must not.

THE LAST ADVISER is the story of a succession told in the room where it happens: the annual reviews, the kitchen-table arguments, the late-night work of writing down everything one man knows before he loses the words for it. It is a novel about what a firm is when the firm is a man, what a family is when the money is the wound, and what it costs to hand the truest thing you ever built to someone whose name you are not allowed to say out loud.