The Joys of Binge Reading

A small town scammed by one of their own in a Ponzi scheme. That’s the scenario for bestselling author Fiona Lowe’s, latest contemporary fiction, The Money Club.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, Fiona unpicks the moral quagmire of those who trade on the bonds of their closest friendships and families for money.

This week’s Giveaway

In our Giveaway this week, Mystery Thriller and Suspense Freebies for a limited time. Once again, we’re giving you a library of choice, including my Hawaiian Christmas novella Captive Heart. It’s a mixture of romance and history, #8 in the Of Gold & Blood mystery series.

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Links to things mentioned in the show

Ponzi Scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme#

ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) https://www.abc.net.au/

Grey (Gray) Nomads https://www.thegreynomads.com.au/

Fiona Lowe Books:

A Home Like Ours (Women’s fiction on the theme homelessness among older women)

https://www.amazon.com/A-Home-Like-Ours/dp/B08SR7PSPV/

Family Of Strangers; https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/89575506

The books Fiona is reading now

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.

https://www.amazon.com/American-Dirt-Novel-Jeanine-Cummins/dp/1250209765

And the controversy over American Dirt

https://www.vulture.com/article/american-dirt-book-controversy-explained.html

The Running Club by Ali Lowe:

https://www.hachette.com.au/ali-lowe/the-running-club-the-gripping-new-novel-full-of-twists-scandals-and-secrets

One Of Those Mothers: Megan Nicol Reed.

https://www.amazon.com/Those-Mothers-Megan-Nicol-Reed-ebook/dp/B0BNGZ2BHJ/

Where to find Fiona Online

Fionalowe.com

Introducing author Fiona Lowe Fiona Lowe Contemporary women’s fiction author

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Fiona. Hello there, Fiona, and welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you with us.

Fiona Lowe: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: Fiona, you’ve got a very impressive back list in the romance area where you started writing You’ve got prize winning books that have won RITAs. That’s the US romance prize and the RUBY, the Australian prize.

But you’ve turned in more recent years to women’s fiction and this one that we’re going to be talking about today, The Money Club is actually about the sixth one of these women’s fiction ones, if I counted correctly.

Why did you make that change from more straight romance to very much women’s fiction?

Fiona Lowe: Oh, I was published with Penguin Random House in America around about the time that they merged. And I had a series, and the first book had done well.

The second book release coincided with the merger and it was absolute chaos. They sacked my editor and they didn’t get the books out of the warehouse.

And then they said, ‘oh, we’re not publishing those types of books anymore.’

I had lived in the States and I was writing books set in America, but when that all happened, I had an absolute hankering to write a book set in my own back garden in Australia.

A forced change of direction that worked out well

I wanted to move beyond looking at one couple and one relationship, and I wanted to roam over all sorts of things and write books about family and communities.

I changed direction, but that said, the emotion that I write into my books now, I probably couldn’t have done without all those years of having written the romance fiction up until that point.

Jenny Wheeler: And are you still with the same publisher, just doing different types of books?

Fiona Lowe: No. I’m with Harper Collins, Australia now, have been for the last seven books.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, fantastic. So it was a complete change and, but you were living in Australia at that time?

Fiona Lowe: I was, but we had been living in the United States, which was why I was setting books over there. But yes, I’ve basically reinvented myself three times within my writing career, since I started.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, amazing. We might get to talk about the third time a little bit later on but also it might have had an advantage, because you’re a truly international author now, aren’t you? You have quite a reach beyond the Australian market.

Fiona Lowe: Yes, I’m published overseas as well as in Australia and New Zealand.

What would you do if you lost all your savings?

Jenny Wheeler: The Money Club introduces us to a group of middle class friends in a small town that are drawn into investing in a financial deal that one of them is running.

This thing called the Elite Club, and it’s not giving any spoiler away to let people know that early on in the process, this turns out to be a con, because it’s already in the publisher’s blurb for the book.

The story deals with the fallout from that.

It seems to me that there’s two ways that people have to deal with this kind of disaster in their lives.

They can try and pick themselves up and say, ‘oh, that’s happened and we’ve got to regroup.’ Or they can spend a lot of energy on trying to exact revenge and justice and almost being in denial that they’ve lost their money, trying to get their money back.

And your people do have those two slightly divergent sorts of responses, don’t they?

Fiona Lowe: When you lose all your money, your first absolute reaction is that you want to get it back.

And as human nature is, we want to blame someone. We want someone else to take responsibility for what happened.

That is a normal response, no matter whether you lose all your money, or whether you’ve gone through a natural disaster.

In the early days in the book, everyone is just trying to keep their head above water.

You go into shock when something like that happens because it’s the last thing you expect when you’ve invested and you’ve been making money.

Especially when you’ve invested with someone that you trust. because Ponzi schemes are inherently based around trust and connection.

They trusted Brad with their money. It was a slow realization that everything isn’t as good as what they thought it was.

That leaves you absolutely floundering, when you realize suddenly life – what you thought had – has done a complete 180.

The characters all have a journey. And they deal with their loss of income in very different ways.

The town where lightening struck twice

Jenny Wheeler: The story is based in a rural town outside of Melbourne, but it could happen anywhere.

We only need to look overseas to Bernie Madoff and the billions that he stole to see that.

But this one has got an aspect of being based on true events as well, hasn’t it? Tell us a little bit about the particular case that you were drawn into.

Fiona Lowe: There’s a couple of things. My claim to fame, I’m not sure it’s a great one, is that I live in a regional city that has been subject to two of Australia’s worst Ponzi schemes.

In fact, we actually had, at one point, standing in our kitchen drinking our wine…

We had one of the perpetrators of one of these schemes We did not invest, but the fact that he was standing in our kitchen came about because of small towns, and the networks.

You are never too many handshakes away from anybody. When this scheme went down and $89 million dollars went missing, a lot of people in my town were affected and I observed the fallout from that.

I hadn’t actually intended to write a book about it. It was just like, isn’t this awful?

It was just sitting there in the back burner. And then another decade went by and the town got hit by another Ponzi scheme.

Are they ‘gullible’ or ‘greedy?’ You decide

And remember listening to an ABC podcast about a couple of blokes down in East Gippsland who had invested and lost money and they were trying to get their money back.

They believed that there was a middle man involved and they were trying to sort that out.

I remembered these families and these workplaces because Ponzi schemes and networks – entire extended families go down.

Entire sporting communities, sections of a factory. They all invest because they all trust each other. And I started to think if you lose everything, normally you can turn to someone in the family and they can help you out.

But if your entire extended family has lost everything, where does that leave you? And I thought, I need to write a book about this.

Jenny Wheeler: Early on there is the question raised of ‘were they gullible or were they greedy?’ And I guess sometimes this might surface in the press as well with the comment t’hey shouldn’t have been so gullible.’ How did you tackle that aspect of it?

Fiona Lowe: That was the big theme of the book, what is need and what is greed? And that was my constant question that I was asking as I was writing the book. Is it greedy to want to own your own home? Is it greedy to want to educate your children? Is it greedy to want to own a Lamborghini and for other cars?

And who makes a decision about what is need and what is greed and where’s the line drawn? So that’s constantly being tossed around.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Facing homelessness at 55

Jenny Wheeler: I must admit that when you read of these stories, sometimes you do think to yourself how terrible it would be.

I’d hate it at this stage of my life now if my relatively modest savings were somehow just all swallowed up

Fiona Lowe: It would be terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.

I’ve written another novel A Home Like Ours that I focused on homelessness. Women over the age of 55 in Australia are the fastest rising group of homeless in the country. because they’ve often come out of divorce or they’ve been a carer or they’ve been raising children and they just don’t have that same income.

And it’s awful to be constantly worried about, can you afford this? And are you a going to be able to hold onto your home?

That’s one of the issues that plays out in The Money Club.

We were talking about being gullible before. The way a Ponzi scheme is structured, we are dealing with narcissists, so when we are dealing with someone like that, we can’t apply our own moral code to these people because their moral code is so far deviated from ours that it’s unrecognizable and they’re very clever.

I’d better explain what a Ponzi scheme is to your listeners in case they don’t know. A Ponzi scheme is a sham investment.

No money is ever generated. How it works is they use the latter investors’ money to pay dividends to the early investors’ money.

Ponzi schemes… ‘Always a red flag…’

Initially people are making some money and then they’ll say to their friends, look, this is really good investment and it’s paying and I’m getting dividends.

Do you want to join? But the later people who invest, they lose everything. And. Yes. The investment percentage payoff is normally higher than other investments.

That’s always a red flag. But then again, there’s been other times where people have taken a risk and it’s completely paid off.

With a Ponzi scheme the risk is actually muddied because of these early payments. They’re not a hundred percent gullible. They’re a hundred percent scammed, and I don’t know about you, but I get at least two scams a week on my phone at the moment. We are being hammered by scams.

In fact, in my town this morning I woke up on the news to hear that there’s a current parking fee scam. People who got parking tickets on the weekend, it’s a hundred percent a scam

Jenny Wheeler: I’m being hit with ones that tell me that they haven’t been able to deliver my parcel. I haven’t had any parcels ordered. And if I just give them my details, then they’ll be able to make sure it gets to me. Yeah.

Fiona Lowe: That’s exactly right. We have to be constantly vigilant.

The other thing about Ponzi schemes and with The Money Club is that this wasn’t a stranger that was suggesting that they invest.

This was a friend, someone they trusted, a man whose father was a financial advisor.

They came with gravitas. And trust is such a huge thing, if we trust people, we will take that step.

The collapse of life dreams – and learning to handle it

Jenny Wheeler: The characters in the book, the dreams that they have are the dreams we all have.

There’s a young couple who want to own their own home. Now we have mentioned about this thing of home ownership.

It might be a little bit more common in Australia and New Zealand that a lot of people assume that the sign of their success in life really is getting to own their own home.

I know that in some areas, it’s not so much a goal in life, but this young couple, they’re gutted when they realize that the home that they have actually put money into is going to be taken away from them.

And then the other older couples, they’re looking at the retirement plans, they’ve got dreams to drive around Australia, et cetera.

It’s the collapse of all their dreams as well, isn’t it that’s involved?

Fiona Lowe: Oh, that’s right. Exactly. And that’s where the anger and the fury and the revenge comes in because, they had plans and these have all been scuttled.

You’ve got a young couple that wanted to pay off their house and have another child and change their life because Jack’s a ‘fly in, fly out’ engineer.

They’re prepared to do the hard yards for four or five years.

That means that Lucy, who’s a midwife, is a sole parent two weeks out of every four and Jack’s away from home.

Stress of relationships is the seed of the story

The ultimate plan was to pay off the house, and then he could take a lower paying job in the district and be a soccer dad, and their life could roll on.

With the loss of their savings, they’re struggling.

Then Jack’s parents, who’ve lost their superannuation, they’re also left struggling.

On top of all this, you’ve also got fraught, intense family relationships. Birdie, who is Lucy’s mother-in-law, they had a difficult relationship before everything went pear-shaped.

You can imagine the stress they’re under now that they’re under a great deal of financial stress.

When I write my books, I’m always looking at interpersonal relationships, and when they exist and then you add on the extra stress. That’s where you get great seeds for story.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and as we all know, I think, money is one of the biggest causes of relationship breakups as well, isn’t it?

Fiona Lowe: Oh, absolutely. Even without having lost all your money, If people overextend themselves to take on a mortgage, then that is always a huge red flag.

Jenny Wheeler: This thing about going away in a caravan when you retire. I think it’s something that’s big in Australia and I think maybe popular in the US as well, but there’s even a name for them in Australia.

You call them the Gray Nomads. Talk a bit about that. I actually looked it up and see that there is a website called the Gray Nomads.

Gray Nomads – a new 60s phenomenon

Fiona Lowe: Oh, the Gray Nomads. I have to tell you, at this time of year Northern Australia is absolutely frantic with people over 60 traveling around in caravans and big four wheel drives.

I was in Broome this time last year, and it was absolutely frantic. Birdie and Mike got married young and they’ve worked hard and all Birdie has been wanting to do for the last few years is take this trip.

Mike promised her, hand on heart he would retire at 60 and then the contracts kept coming and he wants to fill the superannuation up as much as possible.

But Birdie has raised the kids. She’s looked after her elderly mother. All she wants to do is take this big round Australia trip and when there’s an offer for them to invest in a lease, she is very promoting of that, because if this is going to bring Mike’s retirement forward two years.

Then they can take off. That’s her entire focus, this traveling around Australia in a caravan.

Jenny Wheeler: Practically speaking, did you settle on any ways where people can protect themselves against getting sucked into one of these schemes? Is there anything much you can really do?

Fiona Lowe You can do your due diligence, but like I said before, because of how a Ponzi scheme is set up, it’s fake so you could do your due diligence and and still invest.

It was quite interesting when I was researching. One of the Ponzi schemes, a financial advisor, his client had said to him, oh, look, I’m making money out of this.

And he went, oh yeah. And he invested some money into it, and he was an early investor, so he was being paid dividends, but he could not work out how. the money was coming.

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Fiona Lowe – Contemporary Fiction