All the Demons Are Here
A Thriller
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3.7 • 63 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Bestselling author Jake Tapper’s “absolute page-turner” (Gillian Flynn) transports readers to the 1970s underground world of cults, celebrities, tabloid journalism, serial killers, disco, and UFOs.
It’s 1977. Ike and Lucy, the kids of Senator Charlie and Margaret Marder, are grown up—and in trouble.
US Marine Ike has gone AWOL after a military operation gone horribly wrong. Now he's off the grid, working on the pit crew of the moody stunt master Evel Knievel and hanging in the roughest dive bar in Montana. His sister Lucy has become the star reporter of a brand-new Washington, DC tabloid breaking stories about a serial killer and falling in with the wealthy, shady British family that owns the newspaper.
As they deal with the weirdness and menace of the time—celebrities, cults, the rise of tabloid journalism, the death of Elvis Presley, the Summer of Sam, and a time of national unease—Ike and Lucy soon realize that their worlds are not only full of compromises and bad choices, but danger. As their lives begin to spiral out of control, they also spiral towards one another. And the decisions they make could mean life and death not only for them—but also their beloved parents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
CNN news anchor Tapper's limp third mystery featuring the Marder family (following 2021's The Devil May Dance) shifts focus from politician Charlie Marder to his children, Ike and Lucy, in a narrative that toggles between developments in their lives in 1977. Ike, who was traumatized by a combat mission in Lebanon, has joined celebrity daredevil Evel Knievel in Montana as a member of his pit crew. Meanwhile, Lucy has been lured from her reporting job at Washington, D.C.'s Star newspaper after being cheated out of a byline to join the Sentinel, a lurid tabloid published by a Rupert Murdoch stand-in. As Ike struggles with violent impulses and his fraught relationship with Knievel, Lucy's editors challenge her journalistic ethics when they try to pin the identity of a possible D.C.-area serial killer on a young Black man, despite the results of Lucy's own investigation. Overwrought prose ("For America, the entire decade was like a once-glossy Polaroid fading in the sun, all that had been vibrant proven ephemeral") doesn't help sell some wildly improbable plot developments. When a character literally jumps the shark, it's a sign that Tapper's formerly exciting series may have done so as well.
Customer Reviews
Too wordy
The story rambled, often suffocating in irrelevant minutiae.
Fun read
Great summertime read. So interesting, especially for those of us who lived through the 70’s.