Spectacular

New York, 1956. Marion Brooks is nineteen, and the life laid out for her is decided down to the address: marry her college sweetheart, move to the suburbs, raise the children he already has names for. She auditions for the Rockettes instead, and wins a spot in the famous chorus line at Radio City Music Hall.

Rehearsals mean discipline, drilling the same routine until it looks effortless. But the city outside the theater is not safe. A bomber has been planting devices around New York for sixteen years. When the violence reaches someone close to Marion, she starts working with Peter Griggs, a young doctor testing an unproven idea. He believes a bomber's methods can be read for a picture of the man behind them.

Her father wants her off the stage and back under his roof, and the distance between the life he expects and the one she is building runs under both threads of that year. Chapters set decades later, at a reunion of the dancers, follow what she carried out of it.

The novel draws on the real hunt for New York's Mad Bomber and on the Rockettes' own history, moving between backstage detail and a manhunt without losing either one.