[ by Melanie Gretchen ] Goldman Sachs executives probably are in agreement that having a writer in the family is "one too many."  Well, a second former employee - analyst Cristina Alger - writes novels.  That may not be as innocent as it sounds. Ms. Alger's debut novel is "The Darlings."  Set during the industry's 2008 meltdown, "The Darlings" is about the downfall of a hedge fund and the wealthy family that owns it, supported by her work as a bankruptcy attorney at a white-shoe law firm and her own family, which founded New York investment firm Fred Alger Management.  She drew from her first-hand experience on Wall Street when writing her fictional tale, that currently is out in bookstores everywhere. The novel has received positive reviews.  One reviewer calls it a sophisticated page-turner about a wealthy New York family embroiled in a financial scandal with cataclysmic consequences.  Other reviews say:

“Cristina Alger has written a racing, vivid, multi-vocal chronicle of the new gilded age ...,"

"With echoes of a fictional Too Big to Fail and the novels of Dominick Dunne, The Darlings offers an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society—a world seldom seen by outsiders—and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions."

Bio of Cristina Alger. Ms. Alger graduated from Harvard College in 2002, and from New York University School of Law in 2007.  She has worked as an analyst at Goldman, Sachs, & Co. and as an attorney at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale, & Dorr.  She lives in New York City, where she was born and raised. The Darlings is her first novel and she is currently working on her next book. Ms. Alger, 41, was primed, as anyone can be, to write an "industry by the industry" tale, having grown up surrounded by her industry family members.  "One of the things I tried to draw from in 'The Darlings' was the sense that the whole family was involved in the business, and the demise of the business in their case was really like the demise of the family as a whole."  As noted above, Fred Alger is in her family - her father? Not Conference Room-Based. Cristina Alger's book begins with an apparent suicide, setting off a series of investigations and cover-ups by characters including lawyers, financiers, government officials, and journalists.  "It's easy to see finance as something that happens in a conference room, but white-collar crime is fascinating," the author said. Discovery Process. What she found during the course of writing was that corruption was based not in greed, but family loyalties.  Looking back, Ms. Alger realized another element in the collapse of firms like Lehman Brothers and AIG was the widespread flexibility applied to rules by those at the top of Wall Street's towers:

"I think there were 2 sets of rules that were operating during that period.  There were the rules on the books, and then there were the rules that were market-wide practice, and what a lot of people realized was that market-wide practice wasn't always legal."

For further details, go to [Reuters, 2/20/12].