It's the summer of 1942 at radio station WHAR on the New Jersey coast. As bombs fall on Britain, a troupe of gallant actors, sound effects people, writers, and producers explores the promise of this exhilarating medium, struggling to create programming that entertains, informs, and enlightens its listeners.
Into this intense community come Jack Dulaney and Holly Carnahan, determined to find Holly's missing father, who sent his last desperate missive from this noisy seaside town. Holly sings like an angel and quickly becomes a star. Jack -- a onetime novelist who's hit every kind of trouble -- gets hooked by the extraordinary power of radio and discovers that he can write scripts with the best of them.
Holly's father is nowhere to be found, and soon it seems that his disappearance may be linked to an English actor who walked out of the station six years earlier and was never seen again. It is a link that sonic people will do anything to hide -- including murder.
Like E. L. Doctorow in Billy Bathgate or Caleb Carr in The Alienist, Dunning has written a magnificent story of mystery, murder, and revenge that brings to life another era.
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"Radio is the greatest invention of the past four centuries. It ranks right up there with Gutenberg's movable type as an earthshaking force.... One of the first things Gutenberg did with his movable type was print a magnificent Bible. The first thing radio did was argue how much selling would be permitted and how ridiculous it would be allowed to get. If it keeps on the way it's going there won't be anything worth listening to.... I have this almost morbid fear of the future--not that radio's greatest days will fade away but that its greatest day will never come. Fifty years from now it could just be a medium of hucksters and fools, a whorehouse in the sky."The speaker is Jack Dulaney, a novelist who follows a dead man's trail to the Jersey shore in the early days of World War II, where a radio station owned by a recluse has fallen on hard times. The mysterious Harford, who built the station as a showcase for his late wife's ambition, has all but abandoned WHAR, but the actors, writers, producers, and technicians who once shared the dead woman's dream are galvanized by the appearance of Dulaney, who finds his true métier in the creation of original, politically provocative broadcast dramas. He also discovers true love in a talented young singer, Holly Carnahan, whose affections he once sacrificed out of loyalty to his best friend.
Carnahan's search for her missing father involves Dulaney in a mystery rooted in the long-ago Boer War that has grown into a conspiracy peopled by German saboteurs, Irish nationalists, and African freedom fighters. The plotting is dense and the cast of minor characters merely sketched, but Dulaney's creative process is artfully drawn and the ambience of America in wartime is skillfully portrayed. --Jane Adams
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