All the Demons Are Here

CNN news anchor Tapper’s limp third mystery featuring the Marder family (following 2021’s The Devil May Dance) shifts focus from politician Charlie Marder to his children, Ike and Lucy, in a narrative that toggles between developments in their lives in 1977. Ike, who was traumatized by a combat mission in Lebanon, has joined celebrity daredevil Evel Knievel in Montana as a member of his pit crew. Meanwhile, Lucy has been lured from her reporting job at Washington, D.C.’s Star newspaper after being cheated out of a byline to join the Sentinel, a lurid tabloid published by a Rupert Murdoch stand-in. As Ike struggles with violent impulses and his fraught relationship with Knievel, Lucy’s editors challenge her journalistic ethics when they try to pin the identity of a possible D.C.-area serial killer on a young Black man, despite the results of Lucy’s own investigation. Overwrought prose (“For America, the entire decade was like a once-glossy Polaroid fading in the sun, all that had been vibrant proven ephemeral”) doesn’t help sell some wildly improbable plot developments. When a character literally jumps the shark, it’s a sign that Tapper’s formerly exciting series may have done so as well. Agent: Robert B. Barnett, Williams & Connolly. (July)