Edgar Allan Poe Award–nominated author Paul Levine, who is best known for his legal thrillers featuring linebacker-turned-lawyer Jake Lassiter, returns with MIDNIGHT PATRIOTS. This second installment in his new hit series follows MIDNIGHT BURNING, which BestThrillers.com named the “Best Historical Thriller of 2025.”

Levine impressively integrates Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, spymaster Fritz Duquesne, and mobsters Mickey Cohen and Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, who earned his moniker by being “crazy as a bedbug,” into fact-based fiction. Millionaire Bugsy easily could afford a paltry dollar for a meal at  Hollywood's Brown Derby. A million bucks in 1940 equals about $23 million today.

"...a treasure trove of forgotten Americana from nearly a century ago.... The book takes readers on a metaphoric switchback railway ride through treacherous political terrain with the right amount of cotton-candy wit to assuage harsh realities."

In November 1940, “America’s ill-preparedness for the all-but-inevitable war with Germany…a war for the survival of civilization” is evident to all except Franklin Roosevelt, who had won an unprecedented third term, and Charles Lindbergh, eight years after his son’s kidnapping. Chaplin’s five-time Oscar-nominated 1940 film, The Great Dictator, lampoons the “Philistine Führer,” who wants assassins to annihilate the filmmaker and kidnap Einstein for his nuclear physics knowledge.

Despite becoming a U.S. citizen and taking the oath of allegiance, the FBI director equated Einstein’s pacifism to communism by saying, “Mouthing a few words doesn’t change decades of his anti-nationalism and pro-pacifist rhetoric,” yet he condemned British-born Chaplin for not mouthing those words after beginning his Los Angeles film career in 1913. In September 1952, Chaplin was denied reentry to the States during the McCarthy era’s Red Scare, following the 1940 Smith Act. According to this book, but more accurately attributed to the son of Alexandre Dumas, Einstein quips, “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”

The Santa Fe flagship passenger train Super Chief, America’s version of the Orient Express, ferries the titular characters, assassins, FBI infiltrators, Third Reich spies, celebrities and de rigueur femme fatale to a shoot-’em-up at the last stop before Los Angeles.

MIDNIGHT PATRIOTS is a treasure trove of forgotten Americana from nearly a century ago. It is beneficial to read Levine’s eight-page Afterword first, which provides an excellent synopsis of fictional and true-life characters. The book takes readers on a metaphoric switchback railway ride through treacherous political terrain with the right amount of cotton-candy wit to assuage harsh realities.