** Tabloid City by Pete Hamill

What a thoroughly depressing novel. In Tabloid City, a newspaper is dying, two women get murdered, a son loses his bearings, a dishonest fund manager skips town, and somehow the various characters are fated to all come together at the end, which is a bit of a stretch. The story is told from multiple perspectives along a timeline, which can get a little confusing, the characters can be caricatured, and the terrorist attack plot is overly melodramatic, but my reluctance to embrace the story comes more from the unrelenting stream of bad news. Even the few flashes of goodwill fail to erase the impression that we are all doomed.