Wireless - Softcover

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.

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.