Wireless (Paperback)

Jack O'Connell

ISBN 10: 1843446499 / ISBN 13: 9781843446491

Published by Bedford Square Publishers, Harpenden, 2016

About this Item

Paperback. The scene is Quinsigamond, a decaying New England factory town, a model locale of turn-of-the-century chaos. An activist priest meets a grisly death in his own cathedral. The crime has all the hallmarks of a routine Bangkok Park gang killing. But the perp is no everyday low-life but a demented ex-FBI agent named Speer in search of the jammers, particularly the infamous O'Zebedee brothers who have been hijacking local radio airwaves with their singular brand of subversive diatribe. Detective Hannah Shaw, Bangkok Park's undisputed overseer, tracks Speer's enraged quest to Wireless, the funky retro-radio nightclub and epicentre of the diverse jammer subculture. Shaw and/or the Wireless crew must stop the defrocked Fed or fall prey to a campaign of censorship, violence and ultimately death. The scene is Quinsigamond, a decaying New England factory town, a model locale of turn-of-the-century chaos. An activist priest meets a grisly death in his own cathedral. The crime has all the hallmarks of a routine Bangkok Park gang killing. But the perp is no everyday low-life but a demented ex-FBI agent named Speer in search of the. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781843446491

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Wireless (Paperback)
• Publisher: Bedford Square Publishers, Harpenden
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1843446499
• ISBN 13: 9781843446491
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

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.

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.