Damage Control

"Bowen writes with knowledge and wit, tongue in cheek or rudely protruding. His cat-and-mouse corporate thriller zips merrily to a high-speed conclusion."―Publishers Weekly

When shadowy gray market hustler and aspiring crony capitalist Jerzy Schroeder is murdered while Josie Kendall is hitting him up for a million dollars to help cash in on alternative energy funding, the police suspect her of adultery and her husband, Rafe, of homicide. Josie, who works for Majority Values Coalition, an "activist fundraising organization," is a new but passionate D.C. player. Suave Rafe, long a Washington insider, also a long widower, is passionate about Josie. He's on a new track as a literary agent and supporting Josie's how-Washington-works learning curve.

For Josie and Rafe, this isn't a murder investigation but a political damage control problem. They attack the issue with an array of finely tuned skills: strategic leaks, manipulation of the media, judicious use of inside information, and a flexible attitude toward the truth―plus the assistance of Josie's Uncle Darius, a veteran spin doctor with surprising connections, who―luckily―is out on parole.

They'll need a full arsenal, since, as one capital insider points out, "A damage control strategy that hasn't succeeded within thirty days has failed." Along the way, Josie, juggling plot lines, will have to decide whether there are ethical lines that even she won't cross.

A proposal from Schroeder's ex-wife, Ann DeHoin, known as "The Gray Lady," thanks to her wardrobe, shows Josie that she was (and probably still is) being gamed. To what end?

The priority here is to figure out what the game is before the body count rises, while staying on mission at MVC, which gets money from people committed to a cause, spends part of it promoting that cause through channels like running ads, and keeps the rest.

In this contemporary House of Cards scenario, determining who actually murdered Schroeder is a low-priority problem but Josie manages to do that as well. It's all in a day's (well, thirty days') work.

Michael Bowen, a graduate of Harvard Law School with a passion for politics going back to his pre-teens, offers in Damage Control his sixth political mystery and the first featuring Josephine Robideaux Kendall (a rascal and a scamp). His earlier D.C.-based series, beginning with 1990's Washington Deceased and continuing through Collateral Damage, focused on retired Foreign Service Officer Richard Michaelson. Josie Kendall, a twenty-something veteran of congressional staff work and now a promising money bundler is as different from Michaelson as contemporary Washington is from the capital as it was twenty-five years ago. A retired trial lawyer, Bowen lives in Fox Point, Wisconsin with his wife, Sara (also a Harvard Law School graduate and an occasional lecturer on Jane Austen).