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The Hellfire Club

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A young Congressman stumbles on the powerful political underworld of 1950's D.C. in this "potent thriller" (David Baldacci) and New York Times bestseller from CNN correspondent Jake Tapper.
Charlie Marder is an unlikely Congressman. Thrust into office by his family ties after his predecessor died mysteriously, Charlie is struggling to navigate the dangerous waters of 1950s Washington, DC, alongside his young wife Margaret, a zoologist with ambitions of her own. Amid the swirl of glamorous and powerful political leaders and deal makers, a mysterious fatal car accident thrusts Charlie and Margaret into an underworld of backroom deals, secret societies, and a plot that could change the course of history. When Charlie discovers a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of governance, he has to fight not only for his principles and his newfound political career...but for his life.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 26, 2018
      CNN’s chief Washington correspondent Tapper (The Outpost) makes his fiction debut with an intriguing if uneven political thriller set during the McCarthy era. In December 1953, a New York seat in the House of Representatives becomes vacant upon its occupant’s mysterious death. Charlie Marder, a Columbia University academic and WWII veteran, is appointed to fill it after some backstage maneuvering from his well-connected father, a Manhattan power broker. Marder and his zoologist wife, Margaret, make the move to D.C., which is in the grips of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, as well as the dual shining lights of the Kennedy brothers. It’s soon clear that Marder is more pawn than player in a political chess game, even when he tries to stand up against money being funneled to a company that produced shoddy gas masks during the war. He makes friends with the veterans on Capitol Hill, joining them in liquor-soaked poker games. Tapper, whose intimate knowledge of Washington is undeniable, initially spends more time building up the Communist-hunting ambience of the 1950s than developing the plot, but once Marder closes in on a secret society and its tentacles within the government, the action rapidly picks up. Fans of well-researched historicals will be rewarded. Author tour. Agent: Robert Barnett, Williams & Connolly.

    • Kirkus

      March 15, 2018
      In CNN anchor Tapper's first novel, a thriller set in the 1950s, freshman Congressman Charlie Marder is rudely awakened to the killing realities of Washington politics.Marder was a history professor at Columbia University, with a bestselling book to his credit, when he was appointed to a vacant congressional seat thanks to the string-pulling of his attorney father, a Republican power broker. Shortly after taking office, this World War II veteran causes a stir by daring to oppose appropriations to a big tire company whose defective gas masks led to the death of a fellow soldier in France. Caught up in cutthroat politics, Marder is soon drinking too much, bending to pressure, and making compromises that alarm and distance his pregnant wife, a zoologist. This is the heroic former army captain she married? As revealed by the long list of sources Tapper presents, he did his research. And his writing has a relaxed, flowing quality. But in surrounding his protagonist with heavy hitters, including Jack and Bob Kennedy ("No one who knows him calls him Bobby"), Lyndon Johnson, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn, Tapper falls into the old foreground/background trap: Nothing in Marder's story, as fraught with personal tension as it may be, can measure up to the stories of the people to whom he is in thrall. Ultimately, the human scenery of this You Are There for adults overwhelms the narrative. Scant attention is paid to the death of a cocktail waitress who apparently was picked up by Marder at a hotel bash and thrown from the car he was driving. He can't remember a thing. Worse, he is unable to imagine that everything may not be as it seems.Tapper's backstage portrayal of Capitol Hill circa 1954 is breezy and knowing but lacks the ingredients that would make it a successful political thriller.

      COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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