Beat the Devils by Josh Weiss

This inventive, page-turning crime thriller 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.