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Nathaniel Murphy has the speculator's gift — he can read a market's timing better than any man in the room. He reads London's, too, and stakes his future there, on the empire that has always been the empire. He is not wrong about the mechanics. He is wrong about which way the current is running.

Jack Kelley learns everything Nate knows and adds one thing Nate never had: an empire rising at his back instead of fading beneath his feet. He is not the more gifted man. He is the man standing on the side of history that is still climbing.

J.P. Morgan saves the system once, in a library, by force of personal will — and understands, watching himself do it, that a country cannot keep depending on one man's nerve. So he spends his last years building the thing that replaces him: a permanent structure, collective and self-sustaining, so the rescue never again depends on a single man in a single room.

And beneath all three of them, the largest hustler of all: a nation. Independent since 1776, but economically still a junior partner to London for over a century — until, between 1907 and 1913, the ground shifts. Not with a declaration. With a thousand small bets, a thousand small loans, until one morning the world's reserve currency has quietly changed hands, and almost no one in London has noticed yet.

Curtis Rice grew up in western Oklahoma, on land his great-grandparents claimed in the 1893 land run. He started his first business as a teenager hauling hay, and along the way ran cattle, worked feedlots, and checked wells in the oilfield.

He has spent nearly thirty years in markets, hedge funds, and private equity. He began on an energy derivatives desk, then built a physical trading business for a hedge fund, growing a two-man shop into a major desk with the credit and risk-analysis systems underneath it. Later, in senior roles at public and private-equity-backed infrastructure companies, he originated and structured billions of dollars in long-term contracts. Alongside that career, he built an independent buy-side investment firm spanning real estate, private credit, venture, and energy.

He has a passion for understanding history by following the money. He enjoys macroeconomics — how money, interest rates, capital, supply, and demand move markets, countries, and eventually empires. History is typically carried by the flow of money. Or at least rewritten by those who have it.

He holds an MBA in finance from the University of Tulsa and a degree in finance and economics from Oklahoma State University, where he advises the School of Entrepreneurship. He lives in Tulsa with his family. Hustler's Empire is his first novel.