Author Description

The fraud was very clever. A counterfeit cashiers check for $4.8 million looking for all the world like the real thing, with coding designed to cause the check to hang up in the Federal Reserve's check clearing system long enough for the thieves to wire transfer real money to offshore banks. Jack McConnell, a fifty-six year old Colorado Springs lawyer who'd rather be fly fishing in the rivers and lakes of Colorado than practicing law, is called upon by longtime client, Front Street Bank, to find the thieves and put the money back in its customer's account before the bank is sued or, worse, shut down by the FDIC. McConnell is assisted in this enterprise by Veronica Stailey, a computer expert with the Fed who is also the first woman McConnell has let into his life since a painful divorce of many years ago. Joining the team is a private investigator known in the trade only as Ed and whose source of training is not a permitted subject of inquiry. McConnell, Stailey and Ed find themselves on the trail of a money-laundering outfit in San Francisco getting help from an employee at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank who is being blackmailed into providing highly confidential information about the Fed's check clearing and wire transfer systems.