Another really satisfying offering from John Dunning that draws on his considerable expertise in the history of radio in America. His usual blend of detailed setting, well-developed characters and complex plotting made me feel I had indulged in a somewhat higher level of my addiction to mysteries. I love a good story that also makes me feel like I've learned something in the process and this tale set on the New Jersey coast during WWII has revealed a brief period when radio ruled and the best writers and actors wanted to be doing the shows. You get to see how things happen from the inside, the points of view of writers, actors, sound effects people and show producers. Jack Dulaney is trying to help the woman he loves, Holly, find her missing father. At the same time he is finding a new passion and talent for script writing with the support of a reclusvie station owner who dares him to push the limits of network censors who don't want to hear anything controversial or vaguely unpatriotic on the airwaves. In the context of our protagonist's zeal for telling compelling and uncomfortable stories about real people we also get bits of history about various atrocities against "the other"--Kitchener's invention of concentration camps in the Boer Wars, the inhumane treatment of blacks and other soldiers at Florence and Andersonville, the rumored Nazi camps in Europe, and of course the Americans' imprisonment of Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor. Murder, conspiracies, romance--it's all here. For other wonderful mysteries by Dunning, that draw on his years as a rare and antiquarian book dealer, check out Booked to Die or The Bookman's Wake.
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