Capitol Punishment

February 8, 2016
Ohio politics provide the backdrop for Welsh-Huggins’s nicely plotted third mystery featuring disgraced former OSU quarterback Andy Hayes (after 2015’s Slow Burn). Freelance reporter Lee Hershey, who’s been covering a school-funding proposal by Ohio Democrats called Fair Funding Focus (“Leave it to the Democrats” to miss the fact that the acronym is all Fs, Hershey notes), worries that he’s being followed, and he hires Andy, now a struggling Columbus PI, to protect him. A lot of politicians, lobbyists, educators, and entrepreneurs have an interest in the outcome, in particular Ohio governor Thomas Hubbard, who wants to impress presidential candidate JoAnn Rodriguez, a California senator, enough to become her vice-presidential running mate. The stakes rise with the discovery of Hershey’s dead body in the Ohio Capitol rotunda. Andy must navigate a minefield of powerful personalities with few inhibitions in a cautionary tale that’s a perfect read in an election year.

February 15, 2016
Disgraced Ohio State quarterback-turned-shamus Andy Hayes finally finds somebody more widely disliked than he is: a freelance online reporter who's up to his gigabytes in scandal. That's mostly other people's scandal, because Lee Hershey knows where all the bodies in the state capital are buried. That's why everyone within a one-mile radius of the Columbus Statehouse hates him, and that's why he feels threatened at the idea that somebody in a big SUV is following him. Swooping down to hire Andy (Fourth Down and Out, 2014, etc.) as his bodyguard, he carries him off to the Clarmont, a restaurant thronged by his frenemies: Lauren Atkinson, head of the state teachers' union; Allen Ratliff, bow-tied chief of staff to Gov. Thomas Hubbard; Lily Gleason, Hubbard's education liaison; lobbyist Jack Sterling; state Sen. Ottie Kinser; and Justice William Caldwell Bryan of the Ohio Supreme Court. All these worthies are tussling over the fate of the Fair Funding Focus, a controversial education bill Kinser has introduced, and darker powers who aren't in attendance are just as interested in defeating the bill, loading it with amendments, or using it to humiliate their enemies. Andy's stint as Hershey's bodyguard ends when his client is bludgeoned to death in the Capitol press room while Andy sleeps off a doped drink in his car, but the murder doesn't stem the tide of interchangeably scabrous officeholders and hangers-on Welsh-Huggins keeps tossing into the mix. As if worried that his plotting isn't already dense enough, he adds a subplot in which Andy gets the rent reduced for his girlfriend, professor Anne Cooper, in return for his promise to draw out Troy Wardley, the fiance of her new landlord's daughter, Bonnie Deckard, who's been keeping very much to himself ever since his brother's arrest for raping Bonnie's 4-year-old son. It's nice to think there are worse crimes than those of state legislators and their enablers. Not much else in the way of sweetness and light here, though.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2016
Readers should know that this novel is steeped in Ohio politics. Bad people include the senator who gets morning-after pills for his daughter while denying them to rape victims, and the lobbyist whose job it is to lower the percentage of casino revenue going to the schools. Yes, there's a murder mystery here, too. PI Andy Hayes is hired to protect a reporter who's on the mightiest story of his career and fears for his life. The murder weapon, we read later, is a bound copy of an education plan. Curiously, in this overcrowded narrative, it's these zingy touches that keep the reader going. We learn that Shakespeare, not Sherlock, first said, The game is afoot, and that a gathering of pigs is a drove. Blackmail is here, and adultery and bribery, too, as well as murder. But the best parts come when the narrative slows and a character has to reflect, as when one observes that the statehouse is like a salmon run of lies. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)