House of Secrets
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Senator Andrew Foster has it all: charm to spare, a loving wife, a beautiful daughter, and a fast-track career that will surely land him one day in the White House. And with the sudden resignation of the vice president, that track may have gotten a lot faster.
But there’s a problem.
There are people who know that Andy Foster’s charm can get the better of him, and they have bugged the Shelter Island bungalow where he is enjoying a midnight tryst with a beautiful campaign adviser. But all hell breaks loose when a man carrying an iron pipe comes crashing through the bedroom’s sliding glass door. Within seconds, the young woman lies bloodied, dead on the sheets, and Foster has fled in panic.
And it’s all on tape.
As momentum builds for Foster’s likely selection as the next vice president, the senator’s only hope of keeping his involvement with the murdered woman secret is to locate his blackmailers. But even they don’t have their hands on the devastating images. The man they used for the job has turned the tables and is blackmailing them.
All the while, Foster’s personal life is collapsing. His wife, Christine, senses that something is terribly wrong. Unhappy about their daughter’s living in a political fishbowl, Christine is also worried that she and her husband have drifted away from each other. Little does she know that power-hungry politicians and brutal gangsters are ready to rip her family utterly apart.
From the rarefied halls of Washington to the briny boardwalks of Brighton Beach, Richard Hawke pulls back the curtain to reveal what is taking place inside the hearts and minds of the powerful people we read about every day in the news. With House of Secrets, Hawke has delivered a pulse-pounding thriller that ignites the fatal mixture of politics, arrogance, and lust.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Extramarital sex leads New York Sen. Andy Foster into major trouble near the start of this mildly suspenseful if overly familiar stand-alone thriller from the pseudonymous Hawke (aka Tim Cockey). Andy's tryst with political consultant Joy Resnick at her lonely beachfront cottage is interrupted by a madman, who crashes into the bedroom, kills Joy, and gives Andy a serious whack on the head. A low-level Russian mobster, Dimitri Bulakov, catches the entire scene on camera. Hawke then turns to stock characters and situations: politicians with evil agendas, a behind-the-scenes puppet master, and a child kidnapping cranked up to supply an infusion of action into the latter pages. Hawke (Cold Day in Hell) handles these themes well enough, but the ambiguous nature of his main character deflates much of the tension. Is Andy a good person who makes mistakes, or a bad person who gets away with too much? Readers will have to decide for themselves.