House Odds

Starred review from April 8, 2013
House minority leader John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, a Massachusetts Democrat who longs to regain the speaker’s gavel, turns to Joe DeMarco for help with a personal matter, in Lawson’s outstanding eighth thriller featuring the Congressional fixer (after 2012’s House Blood). Mahoney summons DeMarco to his office, where a representative of the SEC has some bad news. Mahoney’s tech-engineer daughter, Molly, is about to be arrested for insider trading. The SEC is after Molly because they think she bought stock worth $500,000 in a company that her Rockville, Md., employer, Reston Technology, knew was on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. When DeMarco investigates, he discovers that Molly has a serious gambling problem and is in deep debt to mobster Ted Allen, who runs a casino in Atlantic City, N.J. As usual, the characters—notably an interesting mix of gangsters, who range from deadly to hilarious—matter more than the plot. Agent: David Gernert, the Gernert Company.

June 15, 2013
Odds favor a good time for the reader as Joe DeMarco faces his eighth case: a looming insider trading scandal with potentially fatal consequences. Except for a few side trips to Manhattan and Atlantic City, Lawson's Joe DeMarco stays close to his D.C. base this time as the venerable fixer for Rep. John Mahoney, now House Minority Leader after the 2012 midterm elections notched him down from House Speaker. The SEC has just arrested Mahoney's daughter, Molly, for insider trading. Molly works for a firm that advises manufacturers on how to improve their products, and it appears that she may have used her firm's information about a new submarine battery to invest a half million dollars. Mahoney is convinced she doesn't have that kind of money, and DeMarco suspects that someone set Molly up to embarrass her father. Molly tells DeMarco she overheard a phone conversation in which a colleague, Douglas Campbell, seemed involved in an inside trade. DeMarco soon links Campbell to two other men, who, as college buddies at the University of Virginia, were witness to a suicide that may have been a murder. Meanwhile, in Atlantic City, Ted Allen, honcho at the Atlantic Palace Hotel, and his sniveling accomplice, Greg, wonder how much longer they can cook the books and keep their boss from spotting their major financial fumble. Then, Allen, clearly in league with the mob, approaches Mahoney with the disheartening news that Molly has racked up a considerable gambling debt. Allen offers to forgive her markers if Mahoney backs federal funding for a convention center that will plunk visitors smack in front of his casino. Mahoney's odds against the house look slim: If he throws in with Allen, he could be exposed for mob connections. If he doesn't, Molly could face prison, or worse. A tad overlong, but funny lines, fiendishly complicated plotting, and swiftly and sharply etched characters make this installment one of the most enjoyable in the series.

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May 1, 2013
When House Minority Leader John Patrick Mahoney's daughter, Molly, is arrested for insider trading, Joe DeMarco, Mahoney's personal troubleshooter, is pulled from his dentist's chair to investigate. Joe, as cynical as Mahoney is Machiavellian, knows Molly and is convinced that the quiet young engineer is an innocent victim of identity theft, but he also suspects that the real target may be Mahoney himself. In short order, DeMarco winds up in a bubbling cauldron of crime, political knavery, and ne'er-do-wells, including a Philly mobster, his Atlantic City casino manager, their thugs, a crazy Manhattan financial wheeler-dealer, and two former college football teammates. Hovering over it all is the never-ending guerrilla war that is partisan politics in a gridlocked House of Representatives, a conflict less popular with citizens than head lice. Lawson has written another fine installment in his DeMarco series, filled with vividly drawn characters, a plot with more bends than the Mississippi River, a brisk pace, and a fine sense of inside-the-Beltway verisimilitude.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)