Kingpin
A Joe DeMarco Thriller
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The latest pulse-pounding thriller from Edgar and Barry Award finalist Mike Lawson starring his beloved Washington DC “troubleshooter” Joe DeMarco.
Carson Newman doesn’t think of himself as a gangster. He doesn’t have a consigliere or operate out of the back room of a bar. No, Carson’s a different sort of gangster, a billionaire Boston real estate developer, who only breaks the law when necessary—and he doesn't usually get his hands dirty.
Joe DeMarco, on the other hand, is paid to get his hands dirty. So, when John Mahoney, the former Speaker of the House, calls, DeMarco knows it’s time to get to work. Brian Lewis, an intern who worked for Mahoney, has been found dead, seemingly from a drug overdose. But Brian didn’t seem like a drug user, and even more concerning, he seemed to be on the cusp of releasing a report that identified a group of politicians who had taken bribes.
Brian’s mom is convinced that Brian was murdered because of what he’d learned, and it doesn’t take long for DeMarco to come to a similar conclusion. A conclusion that points to Carson Newman's empire.
In a city full of shadowy agreements and duplicitous deals, DeMarco will soon learn that to get to the bottom of Brian’s death, he’ll have to look at people perched the very top of the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Political fixer Joe DeMarco faces familiar challenges in the brisk 17th entry in Lawson's series (after Alligator Alley), which finds the operative once again dealing with murder and corruption in the nation's capital. After Brian Lewis—an intern who works for DeMarco's off-the-books employer, former Speaker of the House John Mahoney—is found dead on the toilet in his D.C. apartment, Mahoney asks DeMarco to investigate. The evidence points toward a fentanyl overdose, but DeMarco quickly discovers that Lewis was secretly investigating a bribery scheme involving 12 members of the House. As DeMarco wades deeper into the scandal, he comes to suspect that Lewis was murdered, and winds up in the crosshairs of Carson Newman, a power broker with ties to the Albanian mafia who's known for hiring assassins to eliminate his enemies. Despite the lackluster finale, Lawson continues to capture the qualities that have made DeMarco so easy to root for across the past two decades: his abhorrence of injustice and his willingness to get his hands dirty in service of the greater good. Well-drawn side characters and plausible renderings of crooked political dealings provide a boost. Lawson's winning formula continues to pay dividends.
