Leverage: 1

He never takes what he wants. He simply arranges things until it comes to him.John Hale has understood people since childhood - what they need, what they fear, and how to become whatever a room requires of him. By thirty-one, he is the CEO of a national company, the husband of a woman who loves him completely, and the son-in-law of a family that has handed him everything they built.He has earned none of it. He has taken all of it. And everyone who handed it to him believed the choice was their own.Leverage follows John Hale from a sickly, calculating boy in small-town Oklahoma to the corner office of a West Coast empire - through Wharton, a blackmailed investor, a carefully engineered scandal, two women whose lives he moves like pieces on a board, and a regulatory investigation he redirects with the same cold precision he brings to everything else.He is not a villain. Villains make mistakes. They feel remorse. They eventually give themselves away.