SUNSET EMPIRE

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.