Storyteller |  Entrepreneur  | Novelist

Michael Balter – Bio

Michael Balter is an award-winning author whose debut novel, Chasing Money, was selected as the top crime thriller of 2023 by the Best Indie Book Awards. He is a talented and witty storyteller who has captivated audiences large and small with tales from an extraordinary life.

Born in Berlin, he grew up in a bombed-out building with bars on the windows and bullet holes in the walls. When the Berlin Wall went up, his family fled to Ottawa, Canada where he learned to speak English, and was tormented as the little Nazi boy.

His family moved to Detroit at the height of the 1967 riots, with fires burning and tanks in the streets. During the Vietnam War, Michael volunteered for the Air Force and was an air traffic controller at Udorn, Thailand, at that time the busiest air base in the world. For his service, he received his U.S. citizenship.

As a soon-to-be aeronautical engineering graduate, he parlayed his stories about the war into a job offer from Intel Corporation, entering Silicon Valley on the ground floor and building a successful career in sales and marketing.

In 1998, Michael was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and joined a voice recognition startup that was only weeks away from an IPO when they ran out of cash. Over the next 20 years, he became a serial entrepreneur, helping to create and launch new business ventures ranging from a toolbox company to a renaissance art firm.

The pressure to raise money for these start-up ventures was so intense that Michael once joked that even if someone tried to murder him he would ask him to invest first. That was the genesis of the story of Chasing Money, Michael’s debut novel, a fast-paced thriller that pits two business partners against a vicious Russian killer seeking $10 million and a missing painting.

After retiring, Michael began working seriously on his novel in 2019, building on his experience in the art world and as an entrepreneur and honing his craft as a writer. The book was published in August, 2023, and has garnered praise from reviewers, fellow authors and readers alike. 

Michael lived in Portland, Oregon for many years and now makes his home in Charlevoix, Michigan. He is hard at work on a sequel to Chasing Money.