Damage Control
A Novel
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Critically acclaimed author Denise Hamilton weaves an engrossing story of teenage friendship and adult betrayal, featuring a high-powered crisis consultant who gets swept up in murder and scandal involving a wealthy political family.
Maggie Silver is solidly middle class, with a mortgage to pay and an ill mother to support. She is doing her best to scramble up the ladder at an elite PR firm in Southern California whose clients include movie stars and famous athletes. Now, Maggie tackles her toughest client yet: Senator Henry Paxton, a distinguished statesman who also happens to be the father of Anabelle, Maggie’s estranged best friend from high school.
Senator Paxton’s young female aide has been found murdered, and Maggie must run damage control to prevent the scandal from growing. Thrown back into the Paxtons’ glamorous world, Maggie is unexpectedly flooded with memories from the stormy years in high school when her friendship with Anabelle was dramatically severed after a tragedy that neither of them has been able to forget. As Maggie gets further embroiled in the lives of the Paxtons, she realizes that the ties of her old friendship are stronger than she thinks.
Riveting and suspense-filled, Damage Control examines our craving for celebrity and spectacle, and how far the bonds of friendship can stretch before they break forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this excellent stand-alone from Hamilton (The Last Embrace), 33-year-old Maggie Silver works for "the top crisis management firm in L.A.," which represents movie stars and famous athletes and makes sure the client's version of a story gets told every time, and if that means burrowing for "new facts," so be it. With a mortgage to pay and an ill mother to support, Maggie can't afford to be too picky about her clients, and is willing to suppress personal qualms when her latest turns out to be Senator Henry Paxton, who's also the father of her estranged best friend from high school, Anabelle. The murder of Paxton's beautiful 23-year-old aide could put the senator's career at risk. As Maggie reconnects with Anabelle in the course of trying to contain the damage, she finds it difficult to separate the personal from the professional. The reappearance of old ghosts from Maggie's teenage years doesn't help. The suspenseful denouement should please Hamilton fans.
