Award-winning crime and thriller author Carl Vonderau blends a history of writing, music, and international banking. Join his newsletter and get a free copy of Everybody Needs a Story, a guide for using storytelling to promote your organization.
[A]n intense and suspenseful story of love, loyalty, and danger.
—Author Meg Gardiner
Take a breath and hang on.
—Author Steve Berry
If you haven’t heard of Carl Vonderau yet, you will after Saving Myles.
—Author Matt Coyle
A San Diego banker for the wealthy hides a terrible secret. His father is an infamous serial killer who was imprisoned more than 30 years before. The banker thinks he has a normal life until he’s accused of the same crime. Murderabila won the prize for Best Debut from Left Coast Crime. It also won a San Diego book award for Best Mystery.
Two parents think they’ve tried everything to help their troubled teenage son. But when Myles is kidnapped in Mexico, the only way they can save him is to become involved in money laundering. Saving Myles won the PenCraft, National Indie Excellence, and AmericanBookFest awards for best mystery/suspense.
Award-winning thriller author Carl Vonderau has a background in international banking and anti-money laundering that brought him from the US to South America to North Africa. His work focuses on family and the tensions that can tear them apart – or hold them together.
Carl has a wonderful chat with podcast host Shalom Shore about his experiences as a Christian Scientist.
Photos of Day of the Dead, Jefferson Parker and Matt Coyle. Nonprofit Storytelling conference, and Once Upon a Book event.
Hello from San Diego. Day of the Dead The Day of the Dead is a wonderful celebration that, despite the name, is a number of days in which the dead are honored. It is both a happy and sad occasion with dancing and music. It starts one day after Halloween on November 1. This is […]
What’s it like to live in a place where people are fighting over the language that they can speak? It’s not easy. And in some ways it’s harder than being plopped into somewhere where people only speak one local language. My family went through this when we lived in Montreal for fifteen years. Quebec is […]
So you think your life will be easy because you made a lot of money through early investment in cryptocurrencies? Not so fast. It used to be just your computer was held hostage for a crypto ransom. Now it’s you. A slew of people have been abducted in France and even one New York. Why? […]
The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned a few people and some companies associated with laundering money for the Sinaloa cartel. They’ve used the authority provided by designating the cartel as a terrorist organization. Treasury indicates that the cartel has used currency exchanges and bulk cash pickups to launder the money. This has been going on for […]
One of the strangest trips I took was to Bogotá in 1994, shortly after Pablo Escobar was killed. I was trying to write my first book, a thriller that took place there. I knew people from when I had spent a summer working with the YMCA in Bogotá after graduating from high school. Chepe Laspina, […]
Doing business with criminals can be very profitable. According to a Wall Street Journal article on November 27, 2024, Morgan Stanley did just that. Wealth management represents almost half of the firm’s total revenues. Apparently, many of these clients were thieves, money launderers, and terrorists. When I was a correspondent banker in Canada I had […]
I read a disturbing but not surprising article in the Wall Street Journal. Junior investment bankers routinely work 100 hours a week. An all-nighter followed by a plane flight or customer presentation in the morning is common. They often lose track of what day it is because they never rest on the weekends. After one […]
What Your Banker Thinks When You Want to Start a Business – Carl Vonderau. You’ve got this great idea, or you need to expand your small business to the next level. All you want is some financing to seed your growth. So you go into talk to your boring banker. She loves the idea, but […]
In the last newsletter I described how my former client in Montreal, SNC-Lavalin, was involved in the Grand Man Made River in Libya. In 2011, when the civil war took place, Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saadi, needed to get out of the country. Fast. An SNC executive facilitated a payment of $200K to charter a private […]
La Jolla, because of its wealth, has always attracted scammers. So I wasn’t surprised. that another one cropped up. The company is called Ethos Asset Management. I never heard of it, but back in 2023 the artificial intelligence company Beyond Limits accused the CEO, Carlos Santos, of fraud. But it took awhile to catch him. […]
Do you know what pig butcherers are? These are people who befriend others on websites, gain their trust, and scam them out of their savings. In effect they fatten “pigs” by establishing relationships, and then butcher them by stealing everything they have. Often the butcherers pretend to be in love with their victims. Or they […]
It’s hard to believe how the most rational people can be pulled into a scam. An article in The New Yorker in 2006 shows that this is not true. John Worley was a decorated Vietnam veteran, an ordained minister, and a Christian psychotherapist. He had even developed a psychological profiling tool to help determine his […]
I Got Scammed Too – by Carl Vonderau. Scammers play with your doubts and use your best intentions. I learned that in a movie written by David Mamet called “House of Games.” In that film a psychiatrist helps a compulsive gambler, and is led into a world of scams. I was working with a Canadian […]
