THE RED SCARE MURDERS

Leaving behind the quiet yet murderous settings of Murder at the College Library (2024) and its predecessors, Lehane’s most impassioned and ambitious novel plunges into the anti-communist frenzy of 1950.

Mick Mulligan was fired from his job as a Disney animator when he refused to name names to the FBI. Now that his wife has left him and taken their toddler daughter, he’s hung out his shingle as a private eye. When Duke Rogowski, president of the United Taxi and Limousine Drivers, asks Mick to reopen the case of Harold Williams, a Black communist on death row for shooting his boss, cab company owner Irwin Johnson, Mick’s intrigued by the call. But he has questions of his own. What possible leads can there be that the police haven’t already investigated? Why did Duke wait a year after Williams’ conviction to make this move, only two weeks before his scheduled execution? And how can Mick tack between the wishes of Duke’s two vice presidents, self-identified communist Sol Rosen, who’s eager to see Williams exonerated, and mob boss Vincent Forlini, who’s firmly opposed to troubling the waters? The more deeply involved Mick gets with the richly detailed cast of interested parties—rabid anti-communists, communists and socialist organizers of every stripe, FBI informers, and three beautiful women: Duke’s wife, Cynthia; Johnson’s widow, Eva; and Elena DeMarco, the sister of Williams’ co-worker and friend—the more he realizes that the conflicts that led to Johnson’s murder are a lot more complicated than J. Edgar Hoover evidently assumes.

Consistently more powerful in its exploration of the Red Scare than in its invocation of contemporaneous noir tropes.