Super
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Jim Lehrer's Tension City.
April 1956: Climbing aboard the Sante Fe railroad’s famous Super Chief is an amazing spectrum of passengers. There’s Darwin Rinehart, a once great Hollywood producer who now faces bankruptcy. In a dark recess of a train car hides a mysterious, disheveled man who has not paid for a ticket, smuggled inside by an unscrupulous porter. Millionaire Otto Wheeler arrives in a wheelchair; deathly ill, he knows that this will be his last trip on the great train. Clark Gable causes a stir when he steps aboard, and though he’s ridden these rails for years, indulging in booze and women with equal fervor, those around him sense that this time, something is different. And finally there’s former President Harry Truman, distinguished, congenial, and constantly accompanied by a railroad detective.
As the Super Chief pulls out of Dearborn Station, the passengers—famous and infamous, anonymous and enigmatic—can’t possibly imagine what lies ahead. For as the train gains speed, a series of deadly events unfolds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Those expecting an Agatha Christie homage from TV journalist Lehrer (Mack to the Rescue) will be disappointed by this subpar crime novel set in 1956 almost entirely aboard the Super Chief, the train that ran for years between Chicago and Los Angeles. Passengers include a mysterious sickly man, Dale Lawrence, who gets on in Chicago after bribing a porter for a sleeping berth, as well as celebrities like Clark Gable and former president Harry Truman. Many pages of superficial character development pass before the first corpse appears. Arch attempts at satire (e.g., a movie producer's plan for a film set on the train is clearly meant to be a nod to Hitchcock's North by Northwest) don't mix well with earnest scenes like the one in which Lawrence confronts Truman about his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and later authorize nuclear tests in Nevada.
