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Monday, May 14, 2018

The Hellfire Club

Jake Tapper's political thriller The Hellfire Club (#743) hits all the right notes.  All of his experience reporting on the Washington D.C. scene is put to good use in his fictional newly-appointed Congressman Charlie Marder.  It's 1954 and his power broker father has just had him named to finish out the term for a dead congressman.  But when Charlie tries to block funding for a corporation responsible for the death of one of his men in France during the War, he attracts attention from influential senators pulling the strings behind the scenes - the wrong kind of attention.  It's impossible to tell who is a friend and who an enemy in the political quagmire.  When he wakes up in the mud after a car wreck with an attractive woman's body nearby, Charlie is forced to play by rules that pit him against his own moral compass and strain to breaking point his marriage.

Not only did this novel have a gripping plot, but it's filled with characters and events pulled straight from the history books -  McCarthy, Eisenhower, Jack and Bobby Kennedy - but Mr. Tapper has included all kinds of interesting Washington trivia and factoids.  His notes at the end of the book help the reader sort out what is fact-based with sources for further reading, and what is a product of the author's imagination.  Recommended.

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