From the Foreword: Money Talks is a novel with a strange past behind it-and an even stranger present all around it. It's a book that some readers and reviewers have been kind enough to call prophetic. That's a nice word, and very flattering, but let's be clear: It just does not apply here. Back in 2009--when the novel was first published with the title Maxxed Out and under the pseudonym David Collins--neither I nor anyone else imagined how the world would look less than a decade later, or who would be in charge. I wasn't trying to write a political satire or a predictive dystopia. All I wanted to do was to create an entertaining fiction--part boardroom drama, part dark comedy, part love story, and part murder mystery--about a New York real-estate mogul with a bullying manner, a head of hair flamboyant enough to match his ego, and a somewhat childish fixation to see his name on very large buildings. I wanted to get inside the head of such a man, to understand what drove him, what kind of bottomless need was behind his unremitting quest for attention and for power. First and foremost, then, Money Talks was intended as a character study of a certain kind of billionaire and a certain kind of villain. Cut to the present. Read the headlines. Check out the news. I think you'll get the picture. And I hope you'll agree that this novel, while it makes no claim whatsoever to prophecy, has turned out, at the very least, to be weirdly...and even spookily, timely.