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It's 1957, Ike's in the Oval Office, and ex-pats are in the City of Light. Radio has left its mark, and television's beginning to usurp it. But it's still the newspapers that inform the masses and fire the imagination. Bass is an American reporter at a paper in Paris who wants to work for a bigger and better one. He will get his chance if he can find McGlynn, the most famous reporter in the world, who's missing. Bass' quest to locate and deliver McGlynn provides the framework for this empathetic homage to a time that likely will not come again. It's a tale told well without the need for wistfulness or sentimentality.
Between the pages of this finely paced story, one finds characters who are particularly memorable because they don't fit stereotypes. For example, there's a wife who puts up with more than she should, knows it, but doesn't play the martyr. There's also a mistress who defends her man even though she isn't really his. Then there are gangsters who occasionally get things done with brains before brutality, a survivor of WWII coming to grips with what's left of his life in his own way, and even a protagonist who stumbles as often as he succeeds but still forges ahead anyway.
Best of all, there is a storyteller with a clear and compelling voice that shuns style for simplicity. Author Goulding writes with confidence, no attempts to impress with rhetorical flourishes, and no endeavor to add insight with sweeping profundities. This story about newspapermen is told as a newspaperman might tell it. The result is engaging, involving, and illuminating. It's a walk through a time in history that makes readers wish they had been there.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review