cover image Bad Connection

Bad Connection

Michael S. Ledwidge. Atria Books, $23.95 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-7434-0593-5

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. (Apr.)