John Kador

Emeri Johnson, a 22-year-old finishing her undergraduate degree in personal planning and wealth management at Utah State University, represents exactly the kind of talent the wealth management profession is racing to recruit and keep. She participated in the Schwab Wealth Management Academy, a 15-month hands-on learning program, and recently completed a fellowship with the FinServ Foundation.

As the nation approaches the 100th anniversary of the Great Depression, 2025 saw the release of an engrossing history and an intriguing novel that each opens with the events of Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929. The books take wildly different approaches to underscore how financiers and ordinary citizens experienced the greatest financial disaster in U.S. history.

With summer beach reading season approaching, you can’t beat these 10 novels centering on wealth managers. Wealth advisors, investment bankers, private equity partners, bond traders and hedge fund directors figure into some of the most intense narratives on recent best seller fiction lists. It turns out that finance lends itself to telling the most compelling stories about money, greed, power and trust.