The Master Planets is a story about ethical ambiguity. The protagonist, Peter Jameson, isn’t exactly a nice man, but he’s not exactly a bad one, either, which makes him a lot like you and me. The story of his life, though, isn’t anything like yours and mine, which makes this novel a fascinating read.

The premise of the book is unusual but straightforward: Peter is a self-absorbed teenage rock n’ roll musician on the cusp of a fabulous career when his mother murders a long-hidden Nazi war criminal before shooting herself. The killings blast open a door to her past as a legendary fighter in the Polish Resistance and blow Peter off the arena stage and into a life as a successful if shady lawyer. He becomes obsessed with finding the real story behind his mother’s actions, and it is that quest for truth that drives the novel.

The central question is whether Peter’s mother was a heroic partisan or a horrific murderer. Was she driven by a moral imperative to destroy evil or motivated by simple revenge? She assassinated Germans without a blink and served the Russians as long as their purposes matched hers, but she turned on them, too, when the dog of revenge howled a different tune.

Peter learns most of this from General Gilaad, an Israeli who knew not just his mother but her family in Poland before the war. Throughout the book, he fills in the blanks in the past for Peter, but his stories of Nazi brutality, partisan heroics, and Russian duplicity almost always leave Peter asking more questions than they answer. The General also has an agenda of his own, so neither the reader nor Peter ever knows for sure whether his tales are slanted to enlighten or to persuade. The fog of war obscures as much of the past as it does the present.

Much of the first half of the book is devoted to Peter’s aborted career in rock ‘n roll, which sounds like a highly-unlikely sub-plot to a story centering on a Holocaust survivor, but Gallinger makes it work very, very well. The music business is one of the most ethically ambiguous industries you can imagine, with hundreds of sharp-toothed executives sucking at the money vein opened by a musician’s creativity. Peter proves himself perfectly capable of beating the best of them at their own game.

I also suspect Don Gallinger, like most of us, pounded a guitar in his teens. He may even have played in a garage band. He certainly understands musical performance on a gut level. Very few people can write successfully about music because describing it with words destroys it. Even most song lyrics—especially rock ‘n roll—are ludicrous without melody, rhythm, harmony, and tone to give them meaning. Gallinger accomplishes the feat, though, by using deft syntactic rhythm and perfectly-tuned words to make the reader feel the music:

“My guitar ran over fire and shook off heat. I heard the sound of ghostly swarms rushing down the steep aisles of the arena. The air shivered around me. When Billy and I shouted our harmonies, we heard a rioting noise. My feet picked up his rhythm and I danced my dance to the wordless chant that rose from the darkness.”

His mother’s death knocks Peter off the stage. He’s tortured by her suicide, horrified by the execution-style murder she committed, and dazed by the adulation she receives from survivors of the Holocaust. He resists attempts by others to capitalize on his mother’s reputation as a heroine of the resistance, but doesn’t hesitate to use it to open doors for himself as he builds a fortune in less-than-ethical real estate deals.

Throughout the novel, Peter struggles with the same demons that drove his mother to her shocking death. Sometimes he wins; sometimes the demons win. The Master Planets is a masterful exploration of this most universal of all themes. ( )

I just don't know where to start with this book. It's huge in scope, deep in concept, beautifully written, and an enormously FUN READ that grabs you from the first paragraph, takes you from WW II to the 1970s rock scene to the modern world of high finance, and holds you straight through to a deeply satisfying conclusion. How did Gallinger pull it off, that's what I want to know?

We start out with a tense exchange between Daniel Gilaad, an elderly Israeli ambassador, and Peter Jameson, a handsome, fabulously rich, less-than-ethical New York corporate attorney. The ambassador wants Peter to take part in an event honoring his mother, who had been a partisan fighter in WW II Poland. In the course of the conversation, we begin to see that she had been a rather unique fighter -- and that this "uniqueness" followed her into her new life as a middle-class American wife and mother. We also see glimmerings of how the attorney's own life was twisted by the events that took place many years before he was born.

In the summer of 1973, Peter, a buoyant, handsome, rock wunderkind, had already written two songs -- "The Battle of Britain" and "Oh Laurie" -- that would become rock and roll classics. His band, The Master Planets, was gaining rapt attention across the country for the newness and heat of its music. Then came the suicide of his beautiful and withdrawn mother, and, quickly following, an avalanche of bewildering information about her identity and history as a war survivor. Far from being just another of the innumerable victims of the camps, she had in fact fought with the partisans against the Germans... and exacted retributions of a barbarity rivaling the Nazis' own. She committed numerous acts of bloody revenge. She also saved scores of lives. Shaken by the truth about the woman they thought they knew, Peter's family began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, Peter's talent -- the creative force that had defined, directed, and sustained his life -- suddenly deserted him.

Today Peter Jameson reflects again on the destruction of his family and the dissolution of his dreams. Now a ruthless attorney for international consortiums tied to organized crime, he has embraced his own brand of violence against humanity. The life he lives is far from what he imagined in his exuberant youth, and leaves him with a single, burdensome question: How to reconcile an intimate knowledge of human brutality with the heart's irrational urge to believe again, to desire, to reach out once more toward possibility?

This book is at once an action-based story and a meditation on the costs of violence and revenge. When does self-defense become atrocity, the victim a perpetrator? What happens to us when we cross that line? Spanning five decades in 336 short pages, in beautiful prose that manages to read like a mystery novel, the book explores one man's struggle with a legacy of evil, the search for meaning in the midst of ugliness. It is, simply put, one of the best debut novels I have ever read. Have a look -- you will NOT be disappointed. ( )