Sunset empire

Morris Baker is an L.A. private eye in the late 1950s, endowed by his creator with all the tropes common to the type: boozer; ex-cop; on the outs with the law; given to cracking wise. But there's one big difference: Baker has a very dark past; in WWII, he was a death camp Sonderkommando, delivering fellow Jews to the gas chambers. Now, in this wild roller coaster ride of a novel, he's attempting to make sense of an alternate world where Joe McCarthy is president, Ike is in limbo, and Edward R. Murrow is a fugitive. Baker is asked by the wife of a State Department consultant to find her missing husband, Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, there's the matter of a purported terrorist attack involving a Korean American. Plenty of historical figures pop up along the way: producer Darryl F. Zanuck is restarting his career by making porn films. As he did in the series debut, Beat the Devils (2022), Weiss makes all this work by keeping firm control of his zingy material. And the ending is so powerful one looks away from the page.

In Weiss's superb sequel to 2022's Beat the Devils, set in a horrifyingly plausible alternate 1950s America, journalist Edward R. Murrow has faked his death to facilitate his covert leadership of the Liberty Boys, a group resisting President Joseph McCarthy, who defeated Adlai Stevenson in 1952, and the excesses of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Crackdowns on minorities intensify after a Korean American detonates a suicide bomb in response to U.S. atrocities in Korea, where war still rages in 1959. Against this fraught backdrop, Holocaust survivor Morris Baker, a former LAPD detective turned PI who aids the Liberty Boys, is hired by Ann Kissinger to trace her missing husband, Henry, a State Department consultant. Baker's initial digging suggests that Ann hasn't been wholly frank with him, but he pursues the disappearance at great personal risk. Weiss, who also throws a real-life unsolved murder into the mix, makes suspending disbelief easy by sweating the details of how a McCarthy-led America might have looked. Imaginative worldbuilding enhances the page-turning mystery plot. Fans of Robert Harris's Fatherland will be enthralled. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group. (Mar.)

In this sequel to Beat the Devils (2022), America is fast turning into a Nazi state under President Joseph McCarthy, posing more life-threatening challenges for LA private eye and Holocaust survivor Morris Baker. The year is 1959. It's open warfare on Jews, and Gestapo-outfitted "Hueys" (agents of the House Un-American Activities Committee) are rounding up Asians following a mysterious department store bombing by a Korean American. Baker, formerly of the LAPD, has been hired to find Henry Kissinger, a little-known policy adviser to Vice President Richard Nixon. (Nixon, meanwhile, is hatching a secret plot to sell nuclear warheads to Japan.) Kissinger's disappearance is somehow tied to the murder of Baker's one-time actress girlfriend Elizabeth Short (not the Black Dahlia, just as the novel's Joel Cairo is not the Maltese Falcon character). Hooked on phenobarbital to cope with lung cancer--a result of radiation experiments he was subjected to in a concentration camp--Baker is prone to painful blackouts. And when he's conscious, he gets beat up and strung up. The book is stuffed with fanciful sidelights: Sidney Lumet and Darryl Zanuck working as porn directors; conspiracy theorists claiming the Nazis were actually extraterrestrials. As a practicing Jew--and a guilt-ridden one to boot--Baker is a rarity in crime fiction. But it's difficult to accept him as both "schnapps-swilling schlimazel" and fearless hero--one who single-handedly thwarts a plot by former Nazi scientists to bomb Los Angeles. And though the novel is a darker, more serious effort than its overly flippant predecessor, it goes off in more directions than it can handle. A clever but less-than-cohesive addition to the annals of speculative fiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.