Fever City

Puts a new twist on the Kennedy assassination . . . [a] remarkable first novel . . . delights in sex, hypocrisy and political conspiracy" ( The Washington Post ).If you took James Ellroy at his most imaginative and Oliver Stone at his most conspirato... Read more

Puts a new twist on the Kennedy assassination . . . [a] remarkable first novel . . . delights in sex, hypocrisy and political conspiracy" ( The Washington Post ).If you took James Ellroy at his most imaginative and Oliver Stone at his most conspiratorial, and mixed them up in a supersized martini shaker, you would produce the vivid writing, explosive events, and irresistible entertainment of Fever City, a Shamus Award finalist.The story kicks off in 1960 Los Angeles, with the daring kidnapping of the child of one of America''s richest men. It then darts back and forth between a private detective''s urgent search for the child, the saga of a notorious hit man in the days leading to JFK''s assassination, and the modern-day story of a skeptical journalist researching the still-active conspiracy theories of the 1950s and ''60s, with the aim of debunking them. Just as the detective discovers that thekidnapping is a crime much larger than he imagined, and the hit man finds himself caught in a web that is astonishingly complex, the journalist discovers - to his horror, dismay, and even his jeopardy - that the conspiracy theories might well be true."In this ambitious debut Baker gives us a bare-knuckle take on the president''s murder and adds two other plotlines, connecting them solidly with the equivalent of a jab-jab-cross combination." - The New York Times Book Review "Hits you like a cannonball . . . A turbo-charged, beautifully written noir, Fever City is one of those mind-blowingly ambitious debuts that only comes along once in a great while." - Stav Sherez, author of Eleven Days " Less