Eddie’s gamble backfires, and he disappears.Īfter a year of college, Anna joins the war effort, securing a job at the Brooklyn Naval Yard inspecting parts for battleships. Eddie can barely look at his twisted, immobile youngest but commits himself to making enough money to provide the care she needs, hence his dangerous association with Styles, who walks a thin line between legitimate prestige and violent criminality via his ties to the Syndicate. “After a while you can’t feel anything.” Her father is not pleased, but Dexter grins and says, “Words to live by.” And with that, Egan, a deft and deep-reaching storyteller, establishes the secret triangle upon which this mesmerizing novel of suspense, daring, and determination is so adroitly built.Īnna is devoted to her severely disabled sister, Lydia, as is her beautiful mother, a Minnesota farm girl who made her way to New York and the Ziegfeld Follies. One cold day they drive out to Manhattan Beach to meet with Dexter Styles, a dashing and ruthless nightclub impresario who is impressed with Anna’s urge to walk barefoot in the frigid sand and sea. In Depression-era New York City, Eddie Kerrigan, a self-possessed, exceptionally observant man, takes his smart, circumspect 11-year-old daughter, Anna, along on his rounds as a bagman for an Irish gangster. The sea, in all its gleaming, brooding, swaying magnificence and mystery, calls to the striving characters in Egan’s first historical novel and exerts an equally magnetic pull on readers.
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