Fever City

February 22, 2016
James Ellroy fans will appreciate Australian-born Baker’s ambitious debut with its nervous, jittery style, large cast of characters, and cynical, nihilistic attitude. Set mainly during the early 1960s, the story focuses on the ransom kidnapping of the adopted son of one of America’s richest men and the approaching assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, though the action at times shifts back to the 1940s and forward to 2014. A parade of sadistic thugs, former movie stars, hopelessly corrupt police, revenge-seeking private eyes, and power-hungry billionaires mix with such familiar faces and famous names as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Sam Giancana, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson. Crammed with violence, sadism, torture, and sex, this audacious novel is sure to appeal to champions of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, though some readers may grow weary of all the excesses long before the end. Agent: Tom Witcomb, Blake Friedmann Agency (U.K.).

March 1, 2016
Once more into the rabbit hole of conspiracies-in-high-places we go, this time through a noirish farrago of mid-20th century bad craziness. In this rowdy pastiche of hard-boiled homage and alternative history, Baker assumes the daunting challenge of moving several sets of characters through three time frames. In one story arc, set in the summer of 1960, an LA private detective is hired by a wheelchair-bound megalomaniacal billionaire to recover his kidnapped child. In another, set in the fall of 1963, a professional hit man struggles to retain some individual honor as he gets entangled in a plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. And in present-day Dallas, an investigative journalist sifts through speculations, crackpot and otherwise, linking the kidnapping and JFK's murder. Baker's debut novel packs riffs and motifs borrowed from myriad American crime classics along with brutal, often graphic depictions of murder and mutilation. All of which is served with a heaping, steaming plate of paranoid scenarios involving, as one character has it, "The Mafia. Big Oil. The Intelligence Community. The Military Industrial Complex." Along with the aforementioned characters and a motley (and familiar) assortment of sultry, secretive women and dim and/or brutal cops, the storylines are chockablock with cameos from such real-life personages as Sal Mineo, Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli, Howard Hughes, JFK in flagrante delicto, and Lee Harvey Oswald. There's little if any verisimilitude in this blend that hasn't been handled to deeper, richer effect by Don DeLillo and James Ellroy. And the whole raging melange culminates in a plot twist that is just a shade beyond cute. Any one of his three storylines could have made a more satisfying novel than the one Baker slaps together here like a panini. Even with an overcooked plot, Baker's narrative drive keeps you pressing ahead, and his style shows just enough energy and romance to make you think he could get better with this genre thing as he goes along.

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