Beat the Devils
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
This inventive, page-turning crime thriller, shortlisted for the Sidewise Award, with "palpable emotional depth" (New York Times Book Review) envisions a world in which the Red Scare never ended.
USA, 1958. President Joseph McCarthy sits in the White House, elected on a wave of populist xenophobia and barely‑concealed anti‑Semitism. The country is in the firm grip of McCarthy's Hueys, a secret police force evolved from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hollywood's sparkling vision of the American dream has been suppressed; its remaining talents forced to turn out endless anti‑communist propaganda.
LAPD detective Morris Baker—a Holocaust survivor who drowns his fractured memories of the unspeakable in schnapps and work—is called to the scene of a horrific double‑homicide. The victims are John Huston, a once‑promising but now forgotten film director, and an up‑and‑coming young journalist named Walter Cronkite. Clutched in the hand of one of the dead men is a cryptic note containing the phrase “beat the devils” followed by a single name: Baker. Did the two men die in an attack fueled by better-dead-than-red sentiment, as the Hueys are quick to conclude, or were they murdered in a cover-up designed to protect—or even set in motion—a secret plot connected to Baker's past?
In a country where terror grows stronger by the day, and paranoia rises unchecked, Baker is determined to find justice for two men who raised their voices in a time when free speech comes at the ultimate cost. In the course of his investigation, Baker stumbles into a conspiracy that reaches deep into the halls of power and uncovers a secret that could destroy the City of Angels—and the American ideal itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Joseph McCarthy is the U.S. president in Weiss's misfire of a debut, set in an alternative 1950s America. Agents of the House Un-American Activities Committee (called Hueys) spread fear wherever they go, and Humphrey Bogart, who speaks like his screen gangster persona, is McCarthy's key propaganda tool in fighting communism, starring in such films as It Came from Planet Communist. Det. Morris Baker of the LAPD is called to a crime scene where two men have been fatally shot: out-of-work movie director John Huston and Walter Cronkite, "a young CBS reporter whose career was nothing special." In Cronkite's clenched fist, Baker finds a slip of paper with the words "Beat the Devils" and "Baker." When two overbearing Hueys muscle in on the case, Baker decides to investigate on his own. He ends up being wooed by a possible Russian spy, facing off with Wernher von Braun, and uncovering at least two major conspiracies. Weiss loosely cobbles together these plot elements and many more in a repetitive, overly long narrative filled with superficial characterizations of people who are often just targets for quick cheap shots. An imaginative premise can't save this one.
