THE CANCER THIEF

In Steward’s meta-novel, what begins as a puff-piece documenting a young and ambitious executive becomes a dangerous story threatening the powerful…and the author herself.

Like found-footage films, this work of fiction presents itself as nonfiction. The author introduces herself as a freelance journalist: “This is the first book I’ve written,” she states as prologue. “It will also be my last.” This purported piece of investigative journalism, “taken from hundreds of hours of interviews, thousands of pages of HUB documents, and terabytes of internal media files,” documents “the death of Hendricks United Bank, an institution that, with more than twenty billion dollars in assets and headquartered in downtown Indianapolis, was one of the largest privately-owned banks in the country until it vanished in 2022.” Steward brands this “one of the biggest scandals in financial services history…how one hundred million dollars was stolen from HUB in a matter of seconds on New Year’s Eve 2021.” It all begins with Steward, a self-described “eager young journalist,” profiling Steve Clemens, HUB’s chief lending officer and the first in a proposed “Young Leaders of Indianapolis” series. Her “harmless, feel-good story” becomes anything but when she becomes entangled in the audacious robbery, an inside job with roots in the cancellation of the devastating debt plaguing a cancer-stricken single mother whose “sonofabitch” husband abandoned her and her teenage daughter. A quote from Oliver Stone’s film JFK serves the author (and readers) well: “That’s the real question, isn’t it? Why? The ‘How’ and the ‘Who’ is just scenery for the public.” The author deftly teases all this out, employing convincing “documentation” and artful misdirection. (“I stand behind every word in this story,” she cheekily proclaims.) Steward cannily taps into dissatisfaction with Big Banks and all corporations whose corrupt cultures are a violation of their clients’ trust. The characterizations are strong and nuanced, eschewing cartoon villainy, and effective foreshadowing fuels anticipation to see how things unfold.

A timely mystery-thriller that will keep readers guessing as to the why, how, and surprising who.