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Summary
Summary
In his thrillers starring Joe DeMarco, Mike Lawson has made a name for himself as one of the most entertaining and insightful writers focusing on the dirty games played in our nation's capital. In House Justice , an American defense contractor goes to Iran to sell missile technology, and the CIA knows all about it thanks to a spy in Tehran. But the story is leaked to an ambitious journalist and the spy is burned, brutally tortured, and executed.
The director of the CIA isn't about to let the callous sacrifice of his valuable spy go unpunished. DeMarco's boss, Speaker of the House John Fitzpatrick Mahoney has his own reasons to get to the bottom of the leak: he once had a fling with the journalist, and now that she's in jail for refusing to reveal her source, she is threatening to tell all unless he helps get her out.
DeMarco and the CIA aren't the only ones looking for the source of the leak. Someone else wants to avenge the spy's death, and is tailing DeMarco hoping he'll lead him to his prey. House Justice is classic Mike Lawson-- fascinating characters, inside-the-beltway intrigue, and a gripping plot packed with surprises.
Author Notes
A former senior civilian executive for the United States Navy, Mike Lawson is the author of four previous novels starring Joe DeMarco, The Inside Ring, The Second Perimeter, House Rules, and House Secrets. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After the head of the CIA, Jake LaFountaine, gives a secret briefing to a group of congressional leaders in Lawson's engaging fifth thriller featuring fix-it man Joe DeMarco (after House Secrets), someone leaks the information to the press. This slip results in the brutal killing of CIA agent Mahata Javadi ("one of the bravest persons I ever met," LaFountaine tells a room full of reporters), who was working undercover in Iran. John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Washington's premier political puppet master, tasks DeMarco with finding the leaker. Despite three wild cards confounding the search-a Russian mobster, the wealthy head of a technology company, and a mysterious killer bent on revenge-DeMarco manages to remain alive and get himself a fabulous new girlfriend. The always present push and pull between the political machinations of alcoholic, egotistical Mahoney and De Marco's basic decency raises the ethical stakes. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* An American spy in Iran is exposed by a female journalist, and the spy is tortured, then executed. Enraged, the director of Central Intelligence blames the leak on Congress. Speaker of the House John Fitzpatrick Mahoney isn't sure who leaked the information, but he's certain the journalist, jailed for refusing to name her source, will spill the beans about their one-night stand 20 years earlier. Mahoney summons Joe DeMarco, his personal gumshoe and fixer, to identify the leaker and keep the journalist from embarrassing him. Lawson's tight, high-energy prose drives a plot with more turns than the Burma Road, as DeMarco finds himself surrounded by sleazy legislators, CIA spooks, Russian gangsters, FBI agents, assorted hit men, a misanthropic billionaire, a SoCal surfer/computer-gamer/millionaire, and a mysterious Iranian florist hell-bent on avenging the murdered spy. Some two dozen characters, major and minor, are introduced, and Lawson makes all of them memorable; whatever their background Congress, espionage, Russian organized crime, or American business they all behave exactly as their culture dictates they must. The dialogue is sharp, cynical, and often funny, but the book succeeds because of its characters. Readers may reasonably wonder if these twisted individuals and the bent cultures that animate them might be shaping our lives. A superb example of the post-cold war espionage novel.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Washington political thrillers are, for he most part, born to be boring. The hero is usually some high-minded lawyer who's become disillusioned after placing his trust in a corrupt government official who happens to be a blood relative. Either that or he's some high-minded former spy who jeopardizes life and pension by coming out of retirement to get mixed up in a preposterous plot involving assassins from unpronounceable nations. The nice thing about Mike Lawson's Washington thrillers is that nobody is high-minded. Certainly not John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, speaker of the House ("and God help the country") and as unscrupulous a politician as you'd hope to find outside a federal prison cell. Nor could you pin that high-and-holy tag on Mahoney's go-to guy, Joe DeMarco, who holes up in a subbasement office of the Capitol building and surfaces only when the speaker has some dirty business that needs to be done. In HOUSE JUSTICE (Atlantic Monthly, $24), Mahoney locks egos with Jacob LaFountaine, the director of the C.I.A., who is apoplectic because someone in government leaked information to a reporter, Sandra Whitmore, that resulted in the execution of a valued undercover agent in Iran. Mahoney has a pretty good idea who tipped the intelligence to Whitmore, who has cheerfully gone to jail to protect her source (and advance her career). But since Mahoney doesn't want it known that he once had an affair with her, there's nothing he can do about this mess - except call for DeMarco to bring his bucket and clean it up. And because Lawson delights in inverting even the most banal of genre conventions, he makes sure that a clandestine meeting between the two men takes place not in a dark bar, but at a kids' ballgame. Once some Russian gangsters muscle into the story, the book meets its own quota for preposterous plot developments. But Lawson's homegrown characters - the ones plucked from that busy intersection inside the Beltway where politics, journalism and big money meet to do business - are so flamboyantly and unapologetically corrupt that no matter what they do, they do it with a certain integrity. When Mahoney looks to a photo of Tip O'Neill for inspiration on how to force a congressman out of office, he's only being true to himself. After a swift run of Nascar novels, Sharyn McCrumb recovers her balladeer voice in THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $24.99). While continuing the storytelling tradition of her previous books set in the Southern Appalachians, this new novel jumps back in time to the Depression, when the nation was in the right mood for a sad tale. Erma Morton's story is sad enough, with its lurid details about a young teacher on trial for killing her father - but just wait until the big-city journalists get their hands on it. By the time these snooty visitors have filed their condescending articles about this "hillbilly" coal-mining country, no one would recognize the region's civilized towns and solid citizens. While the plot is too skimpy and the nasty journalists too schematically drawn to sustain this ballad through its last note, the old families who live in proud seclusion up in these hills produce a number of wise souls whose voices are pure poetry. Sorry to rain on the parade of popular authors coming out of Scandinavia, but Swedish citizenship does not automatically confer literary talent on a writer, not even one as widely read as Camilla Lackberg. THE ICE PRINCESS (Pegasus, $25.95), the first of this author's seven crime novels set in the coastal town of Fjallbacka, opens well, with an insider's view of the corrosive forces at work on a small fishing village that is losing its identity as it transforms itself into a tourist resort. But that vision is lost once the focus shifts to the insipid heroine, Erica Falck, a struggling writer who returns home to find that a beloved childhood friend has been murdered. Erica finds plenty of material for a true-crime book ("quite a new phenomenon" in Sweden) once she unearths the shameful secrets harbored by tight-lipped residents of this inbred community. But if her book turns out to be anything like Lackberg's overblown potboiler, with its simplistic characters and stilted language (in Steven T. Murray's cotton-mouthed translation), Sweden's stellar literary reputation might be in trouble. Don't we dearly love bad girls? Hailey Cain, the protagonist of Jodi Compton's HAILEY'S WAR (Shaye Areheart, $22.99), is as tough as the Bates Enforcers ("heavy-soled black lace-ups with a side zip") she wears as a bike messenger in San Francisco. With her conscience in free fall and the law at her back, Hailey hooks up with a friend in a Latina gang and agrees to escort a young Mexican girl across the border and into the mountains of Chihuahua. For all the hairpin turns she takes on this adventure, Hailey proves herself to be a regular straight arrow. Charlie Fox came on strong in Zoë Sharp's early novels but, like a lot of tough girls, softened up with time. Now, thanks to an enterprising small press, we can catch Charlie in the rough. Originally published in 2001, KILLER INSTINCT (Busted Flush, paper, $15) finds this army-trained martial-arts expert on her first job, working security for a club in an English seaside town. Charlie looks like a made-for-TV model, with her red hair and motorcycle leathers, but Sharp means business. The bloody bar fights are bloody brilliant, and Charlie's skills are both formidable and for real. In Mike Lawson's thriller, the speaker of the House needs to hide an affair he once had with a reporter.
Kirkus Review
Seminar-level thriller uses the Valerie Plame case as the premise for a dizzying pursuit of an informant.Soon after gunmen murder Mahata Javadi, a CIA spy attempting to flee Iran, New York Daily News reporter Sandra Whitmore faces a judge in Manhattan at 2 a.m. His honor demands she reveal the source of a story that led to the spy's murder. Jailed when she refuses, the resourceful reporter blackmails Speaker of the House John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, who is married: Get me out of here, she demands, or I'll go public about our sordid affair. Mahoney summons fixer Joe DeMarco to figure out how to satisfy judge and reporter. DeMarco succeeds, then learns that the source Whitmore ID'd used a fake name and may be CIA. Besides DeMarco and Mahoney, many others want to know who the real informant was, and several people want him dead. One is Marty Taylor, who faces the collapse of his computer-game empire since the source revealed Marty's company was selling Tehran equipment to help their missiles strike Israel. Hired gunman Benny Mark goes after the source, for some reason, as does a man known only as the florist, who shadows DeMarco's every move. Enough characters and back stories for a minor Russian novel set in a maze follow, well into the book's final third. Then the patient, meticulous reader is rewarded with swift action scenesa three-way shoot-out in which the shooters aren't always sure of who's shooting at them, and Taylor's nifty escape from thugs driving a car loaded with shovels to dig his grave. As the showdown zeroes in on the main players, a strong point lands when DeMarco's girlfriend observes that the scores of ploys and maneuvers they've outwittedsometimes by luck and timingis the real, unseen stuff of the war on terror. Lawson takes a big step up from House Secrets (2009) with a devilishly intricate, whirlwind tale, wittily told, that delivers a sobering message. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When a CIA officer in Iran is captured and murdered because of a congressional leak, the Speaker of the House sends his fixer, Joe DeMarco, to find those responsible in this fifth book in the series (after House Secrets). One step behind an unknown killer, Joe works with beautiful CIA agent Angela DeCaprio to find the leakers, who are being tracked and killed one by one. As usual, Joe is in the dark about the multiple conspiracies he uncovers, but he won't, or can't, let go. VERDICT Lawson has honed his skill to write a perfect political thriller-fast-moving, cynical, but ultimately moral. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/10; reading group guide available online at www.groveatlantic.com.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
