Afternoons With Harvey Beam

Carrie Cox

Fremantle Press, $24.99

Harvey Beam is a successful radio announcer who escaped his regional home town of Shorton, where his radio career began, largely in order to get away from his father Lionel. But now that Lionel is dying, Harvey feels obliged to go home, uneasy in the suspicion that management thinks he is past his prime. Unlike many talkback kings, Harvey is fundamentally a nice man, and the reader is pleased when the pleasant woman he encounters on the flight turns up again. He gets on well with his mother, his daughter, and his ex-wife. But the vicious and unrelenting animus of his father is something Harvey has never understood, and if this book has a serious flaw, it's that the reader never understands it either. There is no real explanation and no revelation, which makes for an oddly unsatisfying ending to an otherwise intelligent, engaging novel.