Running Burners on Auburn Ave
A Novel

About this book:

Marcus isn't a kingpin. He's the switchboard—twenty-six, meticulous, and buried in the trunk of a '04 Buick with forty-two burners humming against egg-crate foam. His job: keep the voices separated, the codes clean, and the geography straight across Atlanta's Sweet Auburn corridor. No names. No faces. Just rhythm. Then three lines light up at once. A suppressed carbine cracks over Line Six. A woman's voice on Line Seventeen—crisp, corporate, terrifyingly informed—recites his student loan balance and offers a choice: reroute a shipment of "telecom gear" she's already tracking, or become a tactical variable. The IMSI-catcher on the roof of the black Suburban idling at the alley mouth is already drinking every handset's identity. Marcus has four minutes, a lug wrench, and a crawlspace under a condemned rib joint.

What follows is a night-long sprint through Atlanta's veins—streetcar rails, warehouse districts, the neon bruise of Auburn Avenue—where analog tradecraft collides with military-grade surveillance. Cole's cracking at the freight yard. Trev's running blind on Edgewood. Reese is nowhere, and the new managers don't do warrants. They do resolution. Every chapter tightens the net: SIM cards dissolving in bleach, batteries yanked mid-handshake, a legal pad of three-digit codes that might be the only map out. The city's humid, historic streets become a circuit board, and Marcus is the current trying to find ground before the breakers trip.

*Running Burners on Auburn Ave* is a nerve-shredding techno-thriller built on authentic signal intelligence, street-level granularity, and a protagonist who thinks in frequencies. For readers who crave the procedural rigor of *The Wire* crossed with the propulsive paranoia of early William Gibson—where a flipped clamshell is a gunshot, a dropped battery is a grenade, and the only clean exit is the one you engineer yourself. The switchboard is live. The intercept is active. Pick up.