Night Talk

May 23, 2016
Late-night talk-show host Noory (Talking to the Dead, with Rosemary Ellen Guiley) makes his fiction debut with a tense, paranoia-fueled conspiracy thriller. Ethan Shaw, an anti-surveillance hacker, has discovered evidence of a government cover-up of extensive alien involvement in our world. Soon after appearing on L.A.-based talk-show host Greg Nowell’s program devoted to the paranormal, Ethan takes a fatal dive from the window of a high building. When agents from Interagency, a secret government group, visit Greg looking for a file that they think Ethan gave him, Greg flees with Alyssa Neal, who claims to have worked with Ethan at the satellite-controlling National Reconnaissance Office, to try to track down the file before the government finds it or kills them. Snippets of actual articles from such sources as Newsweek and the New York Times about governmental overreach and UFOs lend verisimilitude to the predictable, exposition-heavy story line. Those who buy in to the novel’s antitechnology, anti–Big Brother worldview will find a lot to like. Agent: David Vigliano, Vigliano Associates.

May 15, 2016
A conspiracy theorist gets into hot water when he becomes the subject of an arcane frame-up.Talk radio host Noory (Talking to the Dead, 2011, etc.) mines his own storied career on Coast to Coast AM for this implausible but wildly entertaining postmodern take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The author's fictional avatar is Greg Nowell, the Los Angeles-based host of Night Talk with the Nighthawk, one of those witching-hour broadcasts that warms the hearts of truck drivers, insomniacs, and tinfoil hat fashionistas. "What you call paranoia, I call genuine concerns," Nowell explains. "Our government is not perfect; it spies on us and oftentimes it acts stupid. No business is perfect." One night, the radio host gets an unhinged call from meth-addicted hacker Ethan Shaw, who declares that Greg has killed him and then sails out the 12th-story window of the building across from the studio. The shock jock finds himself in deep trouble when agents from a mysterious government agency accuse him of having received both funds and files from the late hacker just before his death. Soon Greg is on the run with a young woman, Alyssa Neal, who has become collateral damage in the ongoing explosion of his life. From here, the novel plays out like an action-packed combination of The X-Files and Six Days of the Condor as Greg and Alyssa struggle to work out where Ethan's bread crumbs of data lead, not to mention playing a tense cat-and-mouse game with an insane but determined assassin who has been set on their trail. Ultimately, the conspiracy at the heart of Greg's unraveling is something of a MacGuffin, but it's a good one that ties together the Snowden revelations, the National Reconnaissance Office, the surveillance state, and, yes, aliens.An action-packed, deeply paranoid adventure in which all those conspiracy theories, ranging from UFOs to the Kennedy assassination, turn out to be true after all.

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