Food veteran publishes new fictional thriller series set in the restaurant industry; takes aim at impending global food crisis.

Online PR News – 26-April-2011 –Gastro Detective marks the advent of a new genre for the fiction thriller category-the Resto Thriller- where food, finance, global politics and the recurring drama of the restaurant business collide with dramatic and unexpected consequences.

In late 2007, Vincent McConeghy was faced with the sudden and inexplicable prospect of closing his artisan bread bakery (a fourteen year-old enterprise) due to unprecedented price shocks occurring in the wheat futures market.

What McConeghy and others in the food business did not realize at the time was that they were the front line recipients of the effects of a totally new phenomena in food markets and high finance – the indexing of food commodities by major Wall Street firms.

Some Wall Street firms had figured out a way to game the system, and with the deep pockets of sovereign wealth funds, rained down a global economic maelstrom that preceded the great financial collapse of 2008, and whose brunt was borne by small businesses such as McConeghy’s and thousands of others.

“I did not understand how this could happen,” McConeghy said. “We were the tiniest speck in the entire supply chain – the small business end-user. The price of bread can only rise to meet supply costs to a point. Governments understand this. In many countries, they subsidize the price of wheat because it stabilizes populations. But not in the US, and many small businesses here faced extinction if they did not react quickly.”

Fast forward to 2010, signs of another food crisis loomed on the horizon, and the role of Wall Street firms in commodity manipulation has become better understood – if not completely agreed upon – and debated fiercely within many financial circles.

This gaming of the commoditization of food provided impetus to McConeghy’s development of Gastro Detective and its main character, Frank Bruno. In doing so, McConeghy created a new sub-genre for the fiction thriller category – the Resto Thriller.

“Food is one of the most heavily reported upon subjects, whether by traditional media and publishing outlets, or by thousands of blogs that cover every nuance of the industry. Gastro Detective is my attempt to carve a niche for the discussion of food and service in the fictional sense. Simply put, Gastro Detective is a Resto-Thriller; it’s not about food, per se, but about our struggle to feed ourselves in thoroughly modern way.”

Gastro Detective is available from Amazon.com