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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 is the principal of Hoyle Creek Capital, a real estate investment and operations firm he has run since 2005. Before turning to buildings, he spent nearly two decades trading — equities, futures, and foreign exchange — and the habits of that work sit close to the surface of this book: the way a tape reads before a break, the way credit tightens a week before anyone will say so out loud, the small distance between a good position and a ruined one. He lives and writes in Oklahoma. Hustler's Empire is his first novel.