The slate

Twenty-one years after one rising U.S. congressman covers up a mess involving another, the bill comes due, and it's a whopper. Long before he became president, Rep. Harrison Clark liked to party. After one of his playmates, Charlotte Haines--a staffer to his buddy Rep. Paul Paxton--ended up dead of poison-laced drugs on his bathroom floor, Paxton sent his chief of staff, Agatha Cardiff, to sort things out. She called on her old friend Darius McDaniel to move Haines' body to a less compromising location and incidentally to snap a few pictures of Clark helping her lug the corpse outside his building. Now that Justice Albert Northcott is about to announce his retirement from the Supreme Court, Paxton wants his job, and he's willing to threaten Clark with those photos to get his nomination. Agatha, who's been married and widowed and fallen off the map, will get pulled back into this latest round of blackmail as soon as she succeeds in freeing her tenant Shelby Franklin from the high-placed sugar daddy who promised her to the guests aboard a yacht currently sitting in international waters outside Saint Thomas. Agatha's negotiations go surprisingly smoothly, but nothing else does. Soon she's fighting both senior White House aide Felix Gallardo and his old schoolmate,Washington Post reporter Isha Roy, for the upper hand in a dizzying series of complications. FitzSimmons keeps all these double-dealings heartlessly entertaining, with every carrot attached to a hefty stick. As Agatha tells Paxton, who wonders how anyone could be monstrous enough to kill someone, "We'll be lucky if there's only one monster." Proof that the fiction of hard-knuckle political intrigue can still be stranger than the truth, at least this week. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.