Washington, Deceit

When a pious Kansas banking CEO and his sister suddenly become billionaires, rumors fly that the source of their wealth flowed fraudulently from the federal government rather than from their self-described business acumen.

A journalist, lawyer, and Congressman—who hail from the same Great Plains city—team up to uncover the mysterious source of the family’s riches and their meteoric rise in the cut-throat banking sector.

As the trio investigates, they’re plunged into a byzantine universe of corruption that includes higher education chieftains, politicians, and predatory bankers.

The sordid secret of America’s student loan crisis gradually surfaces during the decade that Chapin Alexander, Arik Leaventhal, and Rep. Hyatt Deerfield piece together the players in the unholy nexus of academia, Congress, and Main Street.

WASHINGTON, DECEIT, based in part on true events, is a gripping account of the way in which unbridled greed has so infected even the Ivory Tower, that generations of Americans students will be stuck with life-altering debt while university top dogs, bankers, and members of Congress amass wealth on their backs.

The harrowing revelations in WASHINGTON, DECEIT, with its masterful plot and dead-on dialogue, is a complex fiction debut that shows precisely how the accumulation of money has become woven into the entire fabric of the once-honorable world of higher education.

Ultimately, Harper’s novel underscores the physical and emotional cost of the trio’s heroic efforts to upend the United States’ status quo with respect to college students whose only banking “sin” is that they were not born into wealthy wombs. Ergo, let them eat noodles and become indentured servants.