Excerpt from Bad Paper by Jake Halpern, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

During the day, while he toiled away at Bank of America, Aaron began spending more time with one of his co-workers: a beautiful young brunette named Andrea. Andrea grew up in an Italian-American family in the nearby town of Batavia, worked for a few years as a teacher, and then took a job with Bank of America at its corporate headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. She returned home to western New York and arrived at the Bank of America offices in Buffalo with a sense of deflation that mirrored Aaron's. "There were like nine people in our office and they were all like six days from dying," she told me.

Then she saw Aaron.

"I was standing at the receptionist desk, and he walks by, and I remember in my mind remarking, 'He's got a nice suit on. Okay, maybe this isn't so bad.'" On one of their next encounters, Andrea was stranded in the parking lot with a flat tire, and Aaron came to her rescue. The only problem was that he didn't know how to change a tire properly and he ended up damaging her car. Somehow he managed to make light of the debacle, and his own ineptitude, which Andrea found strangely endearing. They were soon spending more time together and, eventually, started having an affair. "I don't think I was emotionally ready to be married in the first place, but—up until then—I was doing a very good job of faking it," Aaron told me. "Really, it was just terrible judgment."

To this day, Andrea isn't sure what Aaron was thinking at the time. "I don't really know what the draw was—not wanting to be with his wonderful blond wife that everyone loved in order to date a crazy Italian. Who does that? Nobody." Aaron ultimately decided to leave his wife and, on top of that, his job at Bank of America as well. "He basically put his life in a jar and shook the shit out of it," said Andrea. Looking back, Aaron's father, Herb, says that Andrea—whom he calls a "femme fatale"—was a very bad influence on his son. "She's very attractive and very seductive," he warned me.

Aaron's younger sister, Shana, puzzled over her brother's transformation from Wall Street banker to owner and operator of a small collection agency in Buffalo. She would stop by his agency and wonder what her brother had gotten himself into. "I'd be in his office, seeing the people that were coming in, and I was like: What the hell? What do you got going on here? It felt shady." She viewed all of it as being a far cry from the high hopes that her family had for Aaron. Shana recalls that Aaron had nice artwork on the walls of his personal office but that elsewhere in the agency the carpet was ratty, the railings were rickety, and the employees seemed sketchy. "It was like he was trying to put gold rims on a dilapidated car," she said. "It was like he was trying to make my father's office out of something that was not as nice."

Aaron's father, Herb Siegel, was a legend in Buffalo. He was a successful divorce lawyer and the founder of Siegel, Kelleher & Kahn—a hugely profitable law firm that handled divorces and personal-injury cases. In the early 1990s, The Buffalo News ran a lengthy profile on Herb, describing his "Gatsby-esque parties" and his lavish lifestyle. The article depicted Herb at work in his "two spectacularly renovated Victorian mansions" under the soft glow of chandeliers. "He enjoys the perks that come from sitting atop his law firm: The respectful associates whose offices were once the sitting rooms and servants' bedrooms of the 19th century mansion … Clients can't help noticing the glamour, the elegance … [especially] the women who come to him at the most difficult time of their lives and tearfully whisper revealing details about their most personal encounters in their marriages. He is someone who can solve their problems. He has the power to make it better. They adore him."

Excerpted from Bad Paper by Jake Halpern. Copyright © 2014 by Jake Halpern. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.