I’m originally from Ozone Park, Queens, NY, the town in which Jack Kerouac lived when writing his first novel. That has zero relevance to my novel, but I just thought it was a fun fact worth sharing. That and John Gotti, the too-famous mob-boss, ran his business there from the Bergen Hunt and Fish club on 101st Ave. Growing up here, one was very careful about who one crossed: the chances were pretty good they had a connected relative.

My journey into teaching, then business, then banking was foreshadowed by my college experience, in reverse: I started at Pace University in 1986 as a Computer Science major but then got a job at Lehman Brothers as a cold-caller and switched my major to finance. At some point the school decided that a 1.96 gpa was unacceptable, the pleasures of fraternity and dorm life in lower Manhattan getting the best of me, so I dropped, bartended for a year, and returned to school at Hunter College. Three years later I graduated with a degree in English and shortly thereafter left my job at the Crowne Plaza in Times Square to teach English at a private high school on Long Island. After the three best work years of my life, unfortunately at a sub-$20k salary, I needed to leave to go into business.

Now I work in Finance for a global bank.

Holding Patterns is my attempt to get back to a more creative life, leveraging my experience over the last 16 years and hobby of private aviation to write a thriller that gives an authentic feel of life on Wall Street and in a small single-prop aircraft. I’ll leave it for you to decide which one’s more dangerous.

I live in Connecticut with my wife and two kids. But no, I’ve never been accused of embezzling money from my employer!

As a new author reviews and feedback mean a lot. If you’ve read “Holding Patterns” please provide your feedback from wherever you purchased the novel, and of course if you’re interested in keeping in touch I’ve started a new short story and novel that I hope to finish this winter. Join my mailing list.