Sunset Empire: A Morris Baker Mystery

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.)