Pacific Wiretap

by Patrick Downey

Jonathan Fox is an engineering graduate student returning to a summer internship in the telecommunications industry. He has been given a copy of a Confidential letter written by an Air Force colonel on Guam that suggests a wiretap scam of significant proportion has been set up on a fiber-optic undersea cable network. One of the wiretap locations is on Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam, with other locations in California, Japan, and Hawaii. National security may be at risk, aside from theft -of-service. Jonathan's task is to determine how the wiretap scam was established, by whom, and for what purpose. He is assigned to work inside the company's cable station on Guam, ostensibly to fine-tune cable equipment, but quietly snoops on the technicians, a task he finds necessary but distasteful. On his second day on Guam he is invited out to Andersen, where he finds the colonel who authored the Confidential letter to his company has been murdered. As Jonathan pursues his investigation he finds the wiretap arrangement has been established for a very intriguing purpose. The action in Pacific Wiretap creates a scene of adventure, crime, and daring that spans the Pacific Ocean itself.

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2011

About the author

I am the author of Gangster City: The History of the New York Underworld 1900-1935 and Bad Seeds in the Big Apple: Bandits, Killers & Chaos in New York 1920-1940 and Legs Diamond: Gangster.

My newest book, Hollywood on the Spot: Crimes Against the Early Movie Stars, is now available as paperback or Kindle book.

I invite you to visit me at:
www.deadgangster.blogspot.com

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolute junk. I picked this up because it was mentioned as a fictional mystery with a premise relating to undersea cables in a nonfiction academic book on the subject. I love mysteries, I think cables are cool, this sounded like my thing, so I purchased it. But it's garbage-- the writing is amateurish, I guessed the "mystery" from the first couple of chapters, the main character is a prick, it's very clear the author has no idea how 24-year olds talk and act, among a whole bunch of hilariously bad mischaracterizations... if all of that wasn't enough, the immense amounts of racism and sexism in this book would have put me off. Into the trash heap this one goes.