Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

Historical novel about the competing claims of faith, love, and politics during the McCarthy era. Washington, D.C., early 1950s: a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Timothy Laughlin, recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism, meets a handsome, profligate State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leading to Tim's fir