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KINGPIN is the seventeenth book in Mike Lawson's Joe DeMarco series, in which DeMarco, tall, square-jawed, lightly grizzled "troubleshooter" for U.S. Speaker of the House John Mahoney, restores law, order, and justice. It would go to far to say, that like Mycroft Holmes, DeMarco "is the... government," but it would be far more corrupt and inefficient without him.
In this adventure, the "kingpin" in question is Boston-based organized criminal potentate Carson Newman. Not a mafioso nor, Lawson explicitly tells us, a Whitey Bulger type, Newman aims to shore up his business empire by influencing Congress. In the way is Brian Lewis, a chipper, idealistic young Congressional intern. When Lewis dies, seemingly of a drug overdose, DeMarco investigates. He befriends Lewis's girlfriend and mother and tries to bring them answers and closure. On the way, he encounters other organized criminals, and, as Newman tries to evade suspicion, bodies begin piling up.
The villains make for interesting characters. Among them is lobbyist Patrick O'Grady, who is smart enough to more or less extort nearly everyone in his path but not smart enough to figure out how to take his nameless girlfriend instead of his nameless wife on an expense-paid business- trip-cum-vacation. Then there is David Morgenthal, the stupid hit man and blackmailer (do they come in any other variety?) and nefarious Albanian Gabriel Dushku. Speaker of the House John Mahoney remains the shadowy, avuncular, and strangely nonpartisan figure he was in previous DeMarco adventures. The cast gets its timeliness from a minor character, an Alex Jones-type conspiracist crank.
Is KINGPIN's view of Congress accurate? I hope not. I mean, I'm entirely ready to believe that there are congressmen whose female staffers are hired, as one of corrupt former congressman Jimmy Cooper's is, "solely for their works;" Lawson makes this piece of pre-modern Americana seem plausible. I was more skeptical of the Presidential secretary from Omaha with a fake British accent picked up while her husband worked in London.
With the help of Morgenthal's sort-of-relative Sydney Roma, a "brilliant," troubled young woman whose late father was Morgenthal's best friend from the army and then vocational partner and whose mother is conveniently estranged, DeMarco corners the kingpin. If you're interested in caper-like depictions of criminal conspiracy and like Congress as a backdrop, you might enjoy KINGPIN.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, December 2023
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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