Devon Boan

A young writer in 1939 New York discovers clue-by-clue that apparitions from his childhood are pieces of an outrageous plan that could change the course of WWII, but he has just seven weeks to connect the dots, and the quest turns out to be much more personal and costly than anything those spirits revealed.

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Even in depression-racked Mississippi, d’Artagnan Cohen was an enigmatic Byronic hero—a modern Calliope for a mother, bedeviled by a dead father’s frightening legacy, suspicions he may be Black, or Jewish, swept up into Coleridgesque adventures with a league of phantoms. Now he’s 21 and a writer at The New Yorker, and the stakes are much higher. When he rescues a forlorn Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a drunken bully his first week in town, he begins to realize those ghostly episodes from his past are a roadmap for keeping his new friend out of Hitler’s reach.

 

But Bonhoeffer has complex motives himself, and New York City is a minefield for d’Artagnan, forcing him to battle the same recklessness that killed his father, surreptitiously befriend a dirt-poor civil rights paladin, cut a shadowy deal with the Irish Republican Army, and keep himself from being seduced by a tempestuous Clare Boothe Luce, as well as Clare’s puckish daughter home from college. Then the paladin’s mysterious sister catches his eye. It’s a formula for getting a man killed, and time is running out, compelling him into a midnight showdown with Harlem’s most notorious gangster and a desperate race across Manhattan for one final moment of truth at Chelsea Piers.

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If Ray Kinsella of Field of Dreams were a character in Hernan Diaz’s Trust, and the story were written by the Coen Brothers, it would look like THE NEW YORKER.