Sunset Empire (Morris Baker, 2)
In an alternate 1952, Joseph McCarthy, architect of the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, becomes President amid a wave of postwar xenophobia and antisemitism. Suspicion is an American way of life, and those who look, sound, or pray differently live in a state of constant anxiety in McCarthy’s United States.
It is in this atmosphere of fear that private detective Morris Baker operates his Los Angeles detective agency, a haven for those on the outside of this new intolerant and distrustful society. As a Holocaust survivor, Baker finds the blind prejudice, injustice, and violence on the streets of Los Angeles a portent of darker things, especially when a brutal act of terrorism by a Korean-American man leads to the reopening of American internment camps. When a woman steps into his office and asks him to find her missing husband, a minor state department official named Henry Kissinger, Baker discovers that the disappearance may be connected to the terrorist and to a series of murders across the city.
Sunset Empire is an effective and inventive alternate history, showing the rippled effect of postwar hate amplified by a fictional McCarthy White House. Historical figures make cameos in Weiss’s history, often in different roles than they would come to play in real history. Aside from this fascinating premise, Sunset Empire is a solid crime thriller, evoking the noir style of a hard-boiled detective novel. Baker is a complicated character. He is short-tempered, perpetually drunk, and keeps everyone in his life at arm’s length. But, beneath that hard exterior, he is compassionate and unable to resist helping those who have no one else to turn to. The demagogy, the blind patriotism, and the distrust of difference in Weiss’s alternate America feels all too relevant and timely. A prescient, untiring thriller of a novel.
