Charlie and Margaret Marder Books in Order

The Charlie and Margaret Marder books are historical political thrillers, but they also work as a family saga. Jake Tapper drops the Marders into big American moments and lets private worry collide with public power. Real politicians, entertainers, and headlines move through the background, while the invented family at the center has to live with the consequences.

In The Hellfire Club, the story starts with Charlie Marder, an unlikely young congressman in 1950s Washington, and his wife Margaret, a zoologist who wants a full life of her own. That pairing matters. Charlie is inside the political machine, while Margaret sees its rituals and ego from a different angle. Together they make good guides through a capital city filled with backroom bargains, secret groups, social pressure, and danger hiding behind polished manners.

Washington is never just a backdrop here.

The books use place the way good thrillers do. The clubs, offices, living rooms, studios, hotel bars, and private compounds all tell you who holds power and who is pretending to. In The Devil May Dance, the action moves into early 1960s Los Angeles and Hollywood when Charlie and Margaret are drawn into an investigation tied to Robert Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and rumors of mob influence. The setting gets sunnier, but the basic tension stays the same: glamour on the surface, fear underneath.

By All the Demons Are Here, the timeline has moved to 1977 and the family story widens. Charlie and Margaret's children, Ike and Lucy, take on more of the story, one in Montana after a military disaster, the other in Washington working for a new tabloid paper. That shift gives the series a slightly bigger canvas. It is still about politics and hidden deals, but now it is also about media, celebrity, generational conflict, and the strange national mood of the 1970s.

What links all the books is the question of how ordinary decency holds up when the people in charge are hiding things. Charlie wants to do the right thing, even when that is bad for his career. Margaret is smart, observant, and less willing to accept the rules of the room just because powerful men made them. Their children inherit that same habit of looking closer, which is useful, but not always safe.

These are fast-moving books with a strong sense of time and place. Expect conspiracies, real historical figures, family strain, and a lot of tension around what can be said in public versus what is happening in private. They are best read in order, because the relationships deepen from book to book, but each one also has its own mystery and its own mood.