UNTOUCHABLE

A few words idly scrawled on the back of the U.S. president’s speech to the United Nations propel D.C. fixer Joe DeMarco into his latest round of political intrigue.

The cryptic words strongly suggest, but don’t prove, that Brandon Cartwright—a billionaire playboy who was murdered along with his personal assistant during a home invasion a month after having been indicted, just like Jeffrey Epstein, for trafficking a minor aboard his yacht—asked the president for a pardon, and that the president decided instead that the problem had to be settled “Doyle’s way.” The fact that Eric Doyle is the president’s national security adviser and close personal friend places Porter Hendricks, head of the National Archives, in a pickle. He can’t destroy the document, which has been turned over to the archive by people who didn’t notice the handwritten notes on its reverse, and he can’t make it public, either. So, he secretly shares his discovery with House Minority Leader John Mahoney, and Mahoney, eager to reclaim his position as speaker of the House by putting pressure on the president, orders DeMarco, his unofficial bagman, to “poke around” enough to confirm that Cartwright was blackmailing the president, who responded by ordering Cartwright’s execution. The job looks impossible because nobody wants to admit that anything untoward happened, much less talk on the record, and nobody wants to make an enemy of Eric Doyle, much less the president. Of course, that’s what makes DeMarco, DeMarco: He’s repeatedly done the impossible before, and fans will be sure that he’ll do it again. But that’s about all they’ll be sure of in this reliably twisty tale.

No one makes high-level political corruption as blissfully enjoyable as Lawson.