Wireless - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843446499 ISBN 13: 9781843446491

Publisher: No Exit Press

Synopsis

This is a crime novel set in a decaying New England factory town, where Detective Hannah Shaw tracks down a demented ex-FBI agent who has murdered an activist priest. Jack O'Connell is also the author of Word Made Flesh, The Skin Palace, and Box Nine.

About this title

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.

From Publishers Weekly

As in his masterful and hallucinatory debut, Box Nine , O'Connell again conjures up the decaying postindustrial New England city of Quinsigamond, peopling its neon-spattered darkness with the weirdest collection of dysfunctional oddballs this side of TV's Twin Peaks. Police Detective Hannah Shaw must infiltrate the world of illegal radio "jammers" to find a killer whose first victim was a liberal parish priest with a popular radio show. The perp is a deranged former FBI agent waging war on "anarchist scumbags," targeting in particular the jammers, who gather in a club named Wireless. Notable among these is G. T. Flynn, a silver-tongued life insurance salesman; Wallace Browning, a dwarf accountant/dancer and his wife Olga; Hazel, a punkette who sells herself to an Asian ganglord; and Ronnie, a female deejay whose late night show, Libido Liveline , runs on a station whose transmission is often disrupted. Operating offstage are the O'Zebedee brothers, whose outlaw broadcasts take up purloined airtime, and Det. Shaw's missing mentor, speed freak/cop Lenore Thomas. O'Connell creates a wildly colored narrative collage without losing grip of his story line in which factionalized jammers are seen as a kind of conflict-ridden family. His prose, without surface flash or affectation, showcases his characters, giving them an unexpected warmth and credibility, and lending their quirky insubstantial radio world a kind of meta-reality. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: No Exit Press
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1843446499
• ISBN 13: 9781843446491
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384