Untouchable

Lawson's darkly satisfying latest (after Kingpin) finds political fixer Joe DeMarco investigating a salacious cover-up by a senior government official in Washington, D.C. Two months after Brandon Cartwright, a billionaire heir known for his raucous sex parties, is killed, National Archives director Porter Hendricks comes across a draft copy of a recent speech the president gave at the United Nations. On the back is a doodle that strongly suggests the president was planning to have Cartwright murdered by his friend, national security adviser Eric Doyle. Hendricks takes the document to former Speaker of the House John Mahoney, who asks DeMarco to look into the matter. Soon after he begins, people connected to the inquiry start turning up dead, prompting him to turn to his friend Emma, a former Defense Intelligence Agency spy, for help. Lawson loads the action with everything fans expect from the series--banter between DeMarco and Emma, new information about DeMarco's hit man father, perfidy at the highest levels of government--and then pushes the plot into uncharted, pitch-black territory, adding a welcome jolt of gravity to DeMarco's adventures. This long-running series still has plenty of gas in the tank. Agent: Mel Berger, WME. (Feb.)