Beetlebomb

Tom Cahill thinks the two voices on the harassing phone calls he's been receiving are actually one person. But they are indeed different predators: Eddie Branagan, telling him what he's going to do to his daughter Laura; Phil LaPorta, painting a picture of how great a man Tom, a newspaper columnist, really is. Because the novel cuts back and forth between otherwise total strangers suspense is rendered all the more palpable; and the place, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, shows its many sides in and out of our collective American past. Beetlebomb is a pan through mundane time and place, written in opposition to the otherwise unspoken sources of human shame and brutality.