Wireless

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.