Fever City

Fever City is a thriller by the Australian writer Tim Baker, published by Faber & Faber in 2016. It is his first novel, and it is built out of three stories that take place in different decades and slowly turn out to be one story.

The book opens in Los Angeles in 1960 with the kidnapping of the child of one of the richest men in the country. A private detective takes the case, and as he works it he discovers that the crime is much larger than the ransom note suggests.

Running alongside his investigation is the story of a professional killer in the days leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy, and a third narrative set decades later in which a sceptical journalist sets out to demolish the conspiracy theories of the 1950s and 1960s and finds that he cannot. The three strands draw closer until the detective, the hit man and the journalist are all inside the same conspiracy, and Baker moves between the three periods without warning.