From Amazon.com
Penzler Pick, April 2001: Michael Ledwidge follows his exciting debut,
The Narrowback, with another edge-of-the-seat thriller. Sean Macklin is a telephone repairman in New York City. While dealing with a problem on a line, Sean inadvertently plugs into a conversation that he should not be hearing--but he does. Sean's wife is disabled and they desperately need money, and the conversation is about a merger about to take place. Sean knows that inside information like this can pay off big, so he invests, making a handsome profit.
But Sean can't leave well enough alone. He knows that he risks his job tapping into the line of a CEO in a large investment bank, but he also knows that if he does this just a few times, he will have enough money to move his wife to Florida. But then he hears something he really shouldn't. The CEO, in a conversation with an overseas associate, suggests something that Sean knows is more than illegal--it's immoral. Outraged, he contacts his brother Ray, who is a cop, and lets him listen to a tape of the conversation. Sean would like to see the CEO busted and out of a job, but Ray has other ideas for the tape and he's not about to share those ideas with Sean. He asks an old street friend, Scully, to help him out, and between them they place in jeopardy everybody they know. By the time this story is finished we have been treated to a fable about greed that is about as dark as it can get. --Otto Penzler
From Publishers Weekly
From a onetime New York City telephone company employee, author of the much-acclaimed debut novel The Narrowback, this new edge-of-the seat fiction noir rings with authenticity as it imagines the plight of Sean Macklin, a Manhattan telephone repairman who accidentally overhears a phone conversation about the machinations surrounding a big-time business merger. Chemtech CEO Robert Brent is planning a buyout of Allied Genesis, a smaller but technologically superior company, which will send Chemtech's stock soaring and move it to the forefront of the industry. Dreaming of taking his invalid wife to Florida and escaping his dreary existence, Macklin is seduced into using his easy access to the private phone lines of corporate power players to amass a tidy nest egg through insider trading. However, he is torn by the guilty knowledge that Brent sanctioned the murder of 30 or 40 workers protesting conditions at a Chemtech installation in Central America. Macklin's older brother, Ray, meanwhile, still lives with their mother and, like their father, is a cop in the South Bronx. A compulsive gambler, Ray is deep in debt to the mob and on the take. He is also under surveillance by NYPD's Internal Affairs division. Macklin, unaware of his brother's problems, finally decides to ask Ray to anonymously put the tape recording exposing Brent and his co-conspirators into the hands of the authorities. Sensing an opportunity for grand blackmail, which will solve his problems, Ray contacts Brent, a move that makes the brothers targets for termination as the action ricochets around New York City in a series of final, fateful confrontations. Cleanly written and convincingly detailed, this is an assured first effort.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
