Wireless - Hardcover

O'Connell, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892965460 ISBN 13: 9780892965465

Publisher: Mysterious Pr, 1993

Synopsis

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 and pimps, musclemen, drug sellers, and crack dealers. In fact, the perp is a demented ex-FBI agent named Speer, who has arrived in Quinsigamond in search of the "jammers" - particularly the infamous O'Zebedee Brothers - who have been hijacking local radio airwaves with their singular brand of subversive diatribes.
Succeeding to the uncontested overseership of Bangkok Park is Detective Hannah Shaw. Following in the footsteps of a predecessor described as "the original strong-arm goddess with the will of Stalin and a tongue like a razor," Shaw is growing ever more comfortable with the nuances of casual brutality. She tracks Speer's enraged quest leading him to Wireless, the funky retro-radio nightclub and the epicenter of the diverse jammer subculture. The jammers include Flynn, peacemaker, bankroller, father figure; Wallace and Olga, midgets, ballroom dancers extraordinaire, mischievous airwave pirates; Hazel, renegade leader of a would-be terrorist splinter group; Gabe, the mulatto teen with a bad lisp, no family, and a megahertz crush on Hazel; and Ronnie, d.j. and diva of Libido Liveline, the on-air column for the lustlorn. They all become prey of the defrocked Fed in his murderous campaign of censorship.
If Joseph Wambaugh, Stephen King, and Lewis Carroll were to collaborate on a crime novel, the result might well resemble Wireless. With all the explosive brilliance displayed in his award-winning first novel, Jack O'Connell again provides a terrifying and strangely enthralling glimpse into the dark heart of our expiring century.

About this title

About the Author

JACK O'CONNELL is the author of several acclaimed novels. O'Connell has been described as a cyberpunk Dashiell Hammett. His dark, noir-ish crime stories are dragging the crime genre into new realms. He lives in Wooster, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

From Kirkus Reviews

Lieutenant Lenore Thomas (Box Nine, 1991) has left Quinsigamond, Massachusetts, for greener pastures, but the town's crime-infested Canal Zone, home of Bangkok Park, is as busy as ever: here, rival gangs have to fight for attention with a ragtag crew of anarchist ``jammers'' intent on knocking out radio stations and broadcasting their own militantly countercultural programming. The jammers congregate at a bar called Wireless, where their unofficial head, G.T. Flynn--an insurance agent and estate planner who milks the system in order to finance its enemies--dispenses bromides and largesse. One crazy weekend Ronnie Wilcox, goddess of WQSG's ``Libido Liveline,'' comes into Wireless to see whether Flynn knows anything about the notorious O'Zebedee Brothers, who've been jamming Ray Todd's right-wing calls to arms on WQSG, and Flynn takes enough time off from his usual entourage--dwarf ballroom-dancers Wallace and Olga Browning, aspiring terrorist Hazel, and stuttering, Hazel-struck street kid Gabe--to fall into bed with Ronnie. Meanwhile, Hazel, shooting for big-time sabotage, breaks with the jammers of Wireless and uses Gabe as her key to a big-time explosives cache promised by the Angkor Hyenas; Thomas's successor, Detective Hannah Shaw, Hazel's old lover, struggles to keep the peace between the Hyenas and their latest rivals, the upstart Granada Street Popes; and an ex-FBI Torquemada named Speer, after warming up by setting fire to a fatally activist priest, calls Ronnie's phone-in line and pays a personal call on the Brownings in preparation for taking out Flynn. ``Baroque'' ain't the word for this carnival of grotesques. Though the plot is no more than a recipe for producing the maximal number of collisions among O'Connell's wildly free agents, you'll spend a long time on the road before finding a more deeply imagined world than Bangkok Park. O'Connell should apply for his own ZIP Code. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mysterious Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0892965460
• ISBN 13: 9780892965465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 402