Roth's "Nemesis" is the story of a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

Four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot. That's the front-page news facing Carter Ross, investigative reporter with the Newark Eagle-Examiner. The victims--an exotic dancer, a drug dealer, a hustler, and a mama's boy--came from different parts of the city and didn't seem to know one another. The police, eager to calm jittery residents, leak a theory that the murders are revenge for a bar stickup. Determined to uncover the true story, Carter enlists the aide of city editor Tina Thompson to run interference at the office; gay Cuban intern Tommy Hernandez to help him with legwork on the streets; and stripper Tynesha Dales to take him to Newark's underside. It turns out that the four victims have one connection after all, and this knowledge will put Carter on the path of one very ambitious killer.

In 1938, fourteen-year-old Cece, an aspiring radio actress, encounters lies, secrets, and hoaxes both at home and in the studio where she is transcribing the script for Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast.

This book is the third in the Nero and Shamus series featuring investigative reporter Carter Ross. Reading his own paper's obituaries, Carter Ross comes across a woman named Nancy Marino who died in a hit and run car accident while she was actually on the job delivering copies of that very paper, the Eagle-Examiner. Struck by the opportunity to write a heroic piece about an everyday woman killed too young, he heads to her wake to gather tributes and anecdotes. But it is the last place Carter expects to find controversy, which he does when one of Nancy's sisters convinces him the accident might not have been an accident at all. Turns out the kind and generous Nancy may have made a few enemies after all, starting with her boss at a diner where she was a part-time waitress and even including the publisher of the Eagle-Examiner. Carter's investigation of this seemingly simple story soon has him in big trouble with his fulltime editor and sometime girlfriend, Tina Thompson, and the rest of the bosses at the paper, but he can't let it go, the story might be too good. But will his nose for trouble finally take him too far?

As long as Newark Eagle-Examiner reporter Carter Ross turns in his stories on deadline, no one bats an eye if he doesn't wander into the newsroom until 10 or 11 in the morning. So it's an unpleasant surprise when he's awakened at 8:38 by a phone call from his boss, telling him a local policeman was killed and Carter will be covering the story, starting immediately. He's baffled when, hours later, there are still no other reporters at the widow's house.

In a novel of alternative history, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating an accord with Adolf Hitler and accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies.