Damage Control

June 6, 2016
Bowen’s convoluted series kickoff, a political thriller, opens with a bang. As hard-driving D.C. fund-raiser Josie Kendall is leaving the Maryland home of wealthy Jerzy Schroeder, a client with whom she just enjoyed a little extramarital hanky-panky, a sniper shoots Jerzy dead, spattering blood and brain tissue on her DKNY blouse. When the police arrive, Josie says she has no idea who would want to kill Jerzy, though she can think of at least three. Jerzy was set to give a $1 million donation to Josie’s employer, the conservative lobbying firm Majority Values Coalition. The police suspect that the killer may have been Josie’s husband, Rafe, a long-time Washington insider turned literary agent, but that plot line fades away without resolution, as do several others. Still, Bowen (Service Dress Blues) has a good ear for dialogue and clearly knows the hobnobbing ways of D.C. power politics. Agent: Richard C. Levy, Richard C. Levy and Associates.

June 1, 2016
Bowen, who knows a thing or two about how the sausage is made (Service Dress Blues, 2009, etc.), follows 30 tumultuous days in the life of a Washington fundraiser who's been put on the spot.Why are the Maryland police interested in Josephine Robideaux Kendall, of the Majority Values Coalition? Let us count the reasons. She'd been trying to raise a million dollars from crony capitalist Jerzy Schroeder when he was shot. She'd had a fling with her potential client, something both the cops and her husband, literary agent/consultant/navigator Raphael Kendall, take for granted, though neither knows for certain. And she'd been standing 4 feet from Schroeder when he shifted from vertical to horizontal. Sniffing an affair they can't prove, the cops suspect first Josie, then Rafe, and it's clear that the pair need to work together on a strategy for damage control, extricating themselves from the embrace of law enforcement and incidentally finding some way of replacing the fat fee Schroeder would have brought MVC. The first and apparently more consequential of these activities is no more than workmanlike, but the second is consistently delightful. Bowen lovingly details the process by which Josie seeks to peddle MVC's donor file on Schroeder to his ex-wife, Ann DeHoic, who's every bit as cagey as Josie, and her inspired long-term plan for capitalizing on an attempted burglary at the MVC office by launching a YouTube video designed to entice a most unlikely client.The high-speed exposition leads to a brightly disillusioned tour of D.C. institutions that shine more vividly than the people who represent them in Bowen's ebullient antidote to election-season blues.

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June 1, 2016
Harvard lawyer Bowen, a passionate political junkie, takes readers on a roller-coaster ride through D.C.'s underbelly. Josie Kendall, a fundraiser for the Majority Values Coalition, is in the process of obtaining a donation from an aspiring player named Jerzy Schroeder when someone guns him down with a high-powered rifle. Josie is a Washington newbie, but her husband, Rafe, is a well-connected insider and her Uncle Darius is a renowned spin doctor, recently imprisoned but now on parole. The police think that Josie and Jerzy were having an affair and that Rafe killed him for revenge. Josie and Rafe need to clear themselves and so immediately get to work manipulating the media while they investigate. When Jerzy's ex-wife, Ann, enters the picture with a proposal of her own, Josie realizes that she is the victim of a scam but cannot figure out why. Those who love House of Cards, and anyone following the current presidential campaign, will eagerly turn these pages.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)