The Highflyers

The boys of the Hotel Pontchartrain have money, time, and nothing to lose. Detroit in 1914 hums with automobile wealth, and the young men who orbit around Potter Waite live like the city will never change. Waite is their sun, charismatic, reckless, impossible to ignore. He flies planes when he should be in boardrooms. He courts danger when responsibility calls. And as the specter of Europe slides toward war, these privileged sons of industry must ask what they're actually made of. Kelland captures a specific American moment: the last gasp of a carefree elite, the old money of a city being remade by machines. The title works double duty, these are highflyers in every sense, living high off the hog while the world below hurtles toward catastrophe. An aeronautical collision with the mysterious Hildegarde von Essen brings the crash home, literal and figurative. It's period fiction with teeth, asking what wealth means when everything's on fire. For readers who want the pre-Jazz Age, pre-Fitzgerald dissection of American privilege, or anyone drawn to Detroit's first golden age of industry and excess.