The scene is the decaying New England factory town of Quinsigamond, a place fixed permanently on the American literary map by Jack O'Connell's resoundingly acclaimed first novel, Box Nine. Now, in Wireless, events spin ever further into late-twentieth-century chaos. The action starts when an activist priest meets a grisly death within his own cathedral. The crime has all the earmarks of a gang killing from Bangkok Park, congregating point for prostitutes...

An ex-cop gets sucked back into an evil world he thought he'd left behind "Vealshank" Tani's life ends in an abandoned train station. The killers don't just torture Tani, they skin him and hang him from a steal beam as a treat for the carrion eaters. This grisly scene wouldn't matter to Gilrein, a cabbie who knows to mind his own business, except that he spent the evening as Tani's chauffeur. Whether he knows anything or not, his life is now a liability...