Edgar and Barry Award finalist Mike Lawson resumes his beloved Joe DeMarco series with a pulse-pounding thriller starring the Washington DC “troubleshooter” as he tries to pin down a Boston billionaire soaring at the top of the world in KINGPIN (Atlantic Monthly Press). As evidenced by his ever growing Boston empire, Carson Newman doesn’t usually get his hands dirty. Joe DeMarco, on the other hand, is paid to do that, and by the former Speaker of the House, John Mahoney. Brian Lewis, an intense workaholic interning for Mahoney, has been found dead in his apartment, purportedly from a drug overdose. But Brian never showed signs of drug use prior to his death, and he coincidentally seemed to be on the cusp of releasing a report identifying a group of politicians who had taken bribes to help dismantle a recent bill. Brian’s mother is convinced that her son was murdered because of what he’d learned. While DeMarco reaches a similar conclusion, all evidence only points to the sheer impossibility of a murder ever having happened: a locked door to a thirdfloor apartment with locked windows and no fire escape ladder, and no defensive wounds on Brian’s body. In a city full of shadowy agreements and duplicitous deals, DeMarco will soon learn that to get to the bottom of Brian’s death, he’ll have to look at people perched at the very top of the world. MIKE LAWSON is a former senior civilian executive for the US Navy. He is the Edgar Award nominated author of more than fifteen novels starring Joe DeMarco and three novels with his protagonist Kay Hamilton.

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