Weekend picks for book lovers, including 'The Hellfire Club' by Jake Tapper

Compiled by Jocelyn McClurg | USA TODAY

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY’s picks for book lovers include The Hellfire Club, a new political thriller that takes place during the 1950s.

The Hellfire Club by Jake Tapper; Little, Brown, 327 pp.; fiction

CNN's Jake Tapper proves he has the page-turning knack in his entertaining debut novel.

Channeling his inner Brad Meltzer, the newsman pulls out a dossier’s worth of thriller tricks — conspiracy theories, secret societies, blackmailers, duplicitous cronies, whizzing bullets, dead bodies (lots of them) — in this potboiler set during the height of McCarthyism.

Set in a nation’s capital made paranoid by the “Commie” menace, The Hellfire Club revolves around a newbie congressman, Charlie Marder, an innocent who, it appears, may be headed like a lamb to slaughter.

The book opens at dawn on March 5, 1954 with a Chappaquiddick-like scene as a still-drunk Charlie, after a wild party at the Mayflower Hotel, awakens in Rock Creek Park with a mouthful of mud next to a Studebaker he doesn’t recognize. No alarm bells go off when a well-connected lobbyist, Davis LaMontagne, just happens to drive up.

Charlie, who remembers nothing after a last slug of absinthe, is horrified to see a dead girl lying next to the half-submerged Studebaker. LaMontagne’s solution? Put the girl in the car and torch it.

How has the freshman congressman gotten himself into this mess?

USA TODAY says ★★★ out of four. “What’s really fun about The Hellfire Club are the real-life characters who pop up and whom Tapper sketches with aplomb…It’s only April, but this thriller has beach-read written all over it.”

You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor's Stories of Life, Death, and in Between by Daniela Lamas; Little, Brown, 256 pp.; non-fiction

The author, a physician in Boston, is founder of a clinic that focuses on patients who have survived the intensive care unit and are struggling to cope with the challenges of life with chronic critical illness.

USA TODAY says ★★★½. “Dazzling… The patients in this book have something important to say, and so does the author. We should all be listening.”

West Winging It by Pat Cunnane; Gallery Books, 310 pp.; non-fiction

Cunnane, a senior writer in the Obama administration, recalls halcyon days in the White House that were more like hanging out in the writers' room at The Simpsons or Late Night With David Letterman.

USA TODAY says ★★★. “Has the snappy, sunny vibe of a period that ended less than two years ago but seems like another century.”

Women in Sunlight by Frances Mayes; Crown, 448 pp.; fiction

The author of the best-selling 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun brings the magic of Tuscany to life once again in a novel that intertwines the experiences of five American female expats.

USA TODAY says ★★★★. “Endearing…there's a constant sense of revelry with meals, seasonal menu planning, blind wine tastings among friends…”

Varina by Charles Frazier; Ecco, 353 pp.; fiction

Frazier’s novel resurrects and reimagines a fascinating but obscure historical figure — Varina Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

USA TODAY says ★★★. “Lively…Frazier is a superb prose stylist who elevates the historical fiction genre.”

Contributing reviewers: Jocelyn McClurg, Matt McCarthy, Ray Locker, Ashley Day