Listen Now
Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: — The Dinner Party That Ends in Blood
Chapter 3: — 1951: The Boy Who Lies Toward the Spotlight
Chapter 4: — Showbiz, Washington, and a Man Named Hawkins Fuller
Chapter 5: — The Crime Scene, the Closet, and Zara Kallman’s Entrance
Chapter 6: — Jimmy’s Voice, Devin’s Secret, and the Corner on 53rd Street
Chapter 7: — The Trial: Lies, Fakes, and the Night Rebuilt in Court
Chapter 8: — Verdicts, Sentencing, and the Question Matt Can’t Drop
Chapter 9: — The Pin’s Real Price
Chapter 10: — Landfall
Description
Up With the Sun is a fictionalized, historically anchored portrait of Dick Kallman—an ambitious midcentury performer whose brush with Broadway, Hollywood, and television never quite becomes the permanence he craves. The story opens in 1980 New York with a double murder in an Upper East Side townhouse and is narrated by Matt Liannetto, the pianist who attended the victim’s last dinner party and heard a name that will matter later: “This here’s Dante.”
From that crime scene, the novel moves across three decades of show-business history—Broadway choruses, nightclub circuits, Hollywood gossip columns, the Desilu orbit, and the hard turns of fame—revealing how Kallman’s compulsive self-mythologizing and restless appetites collide with crime, money, and power. As investigators close in, Matt’s own late-life relationship and fragile health recast the murder as not only a whodunit, but a reckoning with the costs of performance—onstage and off.
Who Should Listen
- Listeners who like biographical/historical novels set in midcentury Broadway/Hollywood with real cultural touchstones.
- Fans of character-driven mysteries where the “case” exposes decades of ambition, sexuality, and self-invention.
- Anyone drawn to New York–era texture (late-70s/early-80s city life), showbiz lore, and a bittersweet emotional finish.