Sunset Empire
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The Korean War rages on in this thrilling alternate history sequel to Beat the Devils: Morris Baker, now a private investigator, must solve a missing persons case in the midst of an endless battle.
December, 1959: The Korean War rages on.
Protesting the bloody conflict, a Korean-American man by the name of William Yang suddenly blows himself up in the middle of a Los Angeles department store just before Christmas, which leads the U.S. government to reopen the internment camps used during World War II. President Joseph McCarthy's America has never been more on edge, paranoid, and above all, dangerous.
Several weeks later, a woman hires Morris Baker, now working as a private investigator, to track down her missing husband — Henry Kissinger — who may have a shadowy connection to Yang's purported terrorist attack. The ensuing investigation for the missing State Department consultant working for Vice President Richard Nixon sends Baker on another thrilling adventure of deceit, intrigue, sex, murder, and conspiracy where the safety of the entire world may hang in the balance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Weiss's superb sequel to 2022's Beat the Devils, set in a horrifyingly plausible alternate 1950s America, journalist Edward R. Murrow has faked his death to facilitate his covert leadership of the Liberty Boys, a group resisting President Joseph McCarthy, who defeated Adlai Stevenson in 1952, and the excesses of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Crackdowns on minorities intensify after a Korean American detonates a suicide bomb in response to U.S. atrocities in Korea, where war still rages in 1959. Against this fraught backdrop, Holocaust survivor Morris Baker, a former LAPD detective turned PI who aids the Liberty Boys, is hired by Ann Kissinger to trace her missing husband, Henry, a State Department consultant. Baker's initial digging suggests that Ann hasn't been wholly frank with him, but he pursues the disappearance at great personal risk. Weiss, who also throws a real-life unsolved murder into the mix, makes suspending disbelief easy by sweating the details of how a McCarthy-led America might have looked. Imaginative worldbuilding enhances the page-turning mystery plot. Fans of Robert Harris's Fatherland will be enthralled.
