Created by Tim Baker
Private detective NICK ALSTON is just one of the three compelling figures at the centre of Australian writer Tim Baker’s ambitious conspiracy noir, Fever City (2016).
Also along for the ride is an anguished American hitman, Philip Hastings and his Italian partner Luchino, with whom Alston tangles during the investigation into the disappearance of a fat cat Texas oilman’s child in the early sixties, and the whole thing is pieced together fifty years later by Alston’s son, Nick Jr., an investigative journalist in 2014 Dallas, who discovers that his father was more than a little involved, somehow, in the Kennedy assassination.
BUT WAIT! Not only does this headspinner of a yarn deal with that perennial conspiracy magnet — it also drags in the Mob, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, the Roswell UFO crash, the CIA, secret cabals, the Masons, hidden temples, the arms industry, the Illuminati, the Military Industrial Complex, assorted Cuban exiles, Lyndon Johnson and Sal Mineo, (have we left anyone out?), and ties them all together in a conspiracy to end all conspiracies.
It really shouldn’t work, but Baker turns out to be a particularly muscular but deft writer who manages to keep this bad boy moving along, earning a Shamus nomination in the process for Best First Private Eye Novel.
Born in Sydney, Tim Baker has hopped around the globe, and has lived and/or worked in Rome, Madrid, North Africa, India, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and China, and currently lives in the South of France. In 2018, he released City Without Stars, an “epic narco-thriller” set in Mexico in 2000.
UNDER OATH
- “Baker tells his story in three related plots set in 1960, 1963, and 2014, and he constantly moves back and forth among them. Keeping up can be a challenge, but it’s one repaid by inspired writing, memorable characters and an exhilirating, all but overpowering story.”
— Washington Post
NOVELS
- Fever City (2016) |Â Buy this book |Â Buy the audio |Â Kindle it!
ALSO OF INTEREST
- “Fatal Fog” (May/June2018, EQMM)
Hastings and Luchino pop up in this standalone short story.