Fellow travelers

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 first job and--after Fuller's advances--his first love affair. Now, as McCarthy mounts an increasingly desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on "sexual subversives" in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. The novel moving between the Senate Office Building and the Washington Evening Star, the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO's front line in Europe, energized by political drama, unexpected humor and heartbreak.--From publisher description.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.