It was on Tuesday that old Ben Rosselli, president of First Mercantile American Bank and grandson of the bank's founder, made an announcement- startling and sombre- which reverberated through every segment of the bank and far beyond. And the next day, Wednesday, the bank's flagship downtown branch discovered the presence of a thief- beginning a series of events which few could have forseen, and ending in financial wreckage, human tragedy and death. The genius of a master story-teller combines Money, People and Banking into a tense, totally absorbing story of the financial and personal crises behind the dignified bronze doors of a major bank. Interwoven with the dreams, passions, rivalries and guilty secrets of its employees are currency and credit card frauds, embezzlement, a prison gang rape, Mafia torture, and the call-girl sex that sweetens irregular business deals. The Moneychangers blens action, suspense, mystery and torrid love scenes in a powerfully entertaining novel that is as topical as tomorrow's headlines.

Arthur Hailey was born in 1920 at Luton, where he attended school, then worked as an office boy and clerk. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined Force and rose through the ranks to become a pilot and Flight Lieutenant. In 1974 he emigrated to Canada successively a real-estate salesman, business-magazine editor and a sales and advertising executive. He became a full-time author in 1956 following the overnight success of his television play 'Flight into Danger' which was performed worldwide, later becoming a novel and a film. In his long career as a novelist he wrote eleven novels which have been published in twenty-seven languages. Arthur Hailey died on November 24, 2004.