Mangoes for Fools

Mangoes for Fools wraps a gripping murder mystery around a gritty look into the casual brutality and rampant corruption that marks daily life in Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet. The book’s central character is Ken Carlton, a venture capitalist and expert marksman who has used his brains and near-obsessive sense of discipline to escape a dirt-poor Texas town and become a corporate takeover master.
Ken’s life from an early age has always been about cold calculation, ambition, control and making money, until he receives a fateful phone call informing him that his estranged father has been murdered in Haiti.
Arriving in Haiti, Ken meets a Haitian detective, StJuste who is assigned to his father’s murder. StJuste sees Ken as the ugly American exercising white privilege to monopolize his time and meager resources. But it is with StJuste that Ken gets the insider’s tour of Haiti’s sights and smells and its people—some warm and welcoming, others venal and murderous. It is also a tour of a social structure that brings extreme poverty for most and wealth to a well-connected few.
Ken discovers that his father was assassinated in broad daylight by several gunmen on the side of a highway. Yanked out of his comfort zone and into circumstances both deeply foreign and out of his control, Ken begins to investigate his father’s murder—an intense endeavor that threatens his own life but also transforms him as a person and businessman. He learns that the solid business man and straight-laced Christian he knew his dad to be as a child had for years been living a double-life on the island, a double life that eventually led to his death.
An enthralling whodunit with breathtaking twists and turns, Mangoes for Fools takes the reader deep into two worlds with which author Frederic Larreur is intimately familiar: Haitian society--he was reared in Haiti, and corporate finance-- he has worked as a finance consultant for corporations ranging from Fortune 100 to mid-sized and small companies.
An international accounting consultant with a passion for writing, Frederic Larreur has been privy to the internal workings of corporations all over the world, particularly in the Caribbean, and the United States. He drew from his personal experience and expertise to write Mango for Fools, the first of a series of thrillers.
In these thrillers he wants to show and explore the growing gap between a very wealthy few and the large number of super poor, the growing power of a few that is based on connection and not on merit and the organized corruption found in our elites everywhere that is now poisoning our societies.