American Rocket Science

Bestselling author William P. Wood whose novels have been filmed and entertained millions launches a comedy thriller that takes on Hollywood, TV, and a wild bunch of show business crazies. It's the mid-1950s in a new post WWII world. On the set of the country's, favorite weekly live coast to coast TV program, 'All American Variety Show' this week's guests gather: a world famous German rocket scientist, a crooked mentalist, and a communist comic. The show must go on, in spite of bumbling Russian agents, wannabe actors, and the well-intentioned missteps of the show's young director, Ted Morton, whose personal and professional lives are racing one another to the bottom in freefall. Ted desperately needs a win for this week's show. So do the other guests, especially the charismatic German rocket scientist, Dr. Erwin Treusch. He wants to sell the American public on his wildly expensive dream projects to send men to the moon and then to Mars. But was he or wasn't he a Nazi during the war? And who knows? Booked with Treusch is the Great Palladini, as he's been billed for a quarter century, a canny and crooked mentalist, who has concocted a surefire new act. He will read the mind of a submarine captain on national TV. Joe's an old trouper and his surefire act, so it can't fail. Or can it? The final guest is a semi blacklisted comedian, Nick Berne, who hopes to prove he's still bankable by doing a great set on Ted show. And not incidentally, rekindle a former romance with Ted Morton's very troubled wife.

What could possibly go wrong as the hours tick toward the moment when America will turn on its TVs? Was Treusch, a charming, witty, brilliant, personality, nevertheless, a Nazi? Who besides him knows the truth? Will the Russians, who have managed to get hired as stage hands for the show, succeed in their plot to kill Treusch? The night of the live TV broadcast is chaos, slapstick, violence, and a glimpse of the supernatural as Russian agents, stumble toward their goal, and, just possibly, the great Palladini connects with the spirits of the dead victims who built Treusch's, Nazi rockets.