Bad Connection

New York City telephone repairman Sean Macklin has a good enough life, but he wishes he could get his hands on some extra dough and move with his disabled wife to Florida.
So when he inadvertently taps into a secret conversation between an investment banker and a dot-com entrepreneur, and before his conscience can tell him otherwise, he turns his insider information of an imminent merger into a tidy profit through day trading.
As his penchant for subversive stock deals grows, so do the risks. But the day he taps into the line of a chemical company's CEO, a man with the power to order a clean merger - at any cost - Macklin's get-rich-quick plan starts to spiral desperately out of control. Hearing more than he should, he calls on his brother, NYPD officer Ray, for help. In a world where nothing is as it sounds, the Macklin brothers become the bait in a cutthroat game of blackmail, corruption, and violence. And Sean Macklin's dream of a better life becomes a fatal nightmare.

Michael Ledwidge is a New York City telephone man and the author of The Narrowback, now available in paperback from Pocket Books, which he wrote while working as a doorman in midtown Manhattan. A graduate of Manhattan College, Ledwidge was born and raised in the Bronx, where he still lives.