"House Secrets," Mike Lawson's fourth installment of the Joe DeMarco thrillers truly keeps you guessing until the very end - and that's hard to do by anybody's standards.
As usual, the everyday man, Joe DeMarco, a lawyer who works specifically for the Speaker of the House, finds himself slipping into the quicksand of another political mystery. The deeper he goes, the more dangerous it becomes for him and everyone around him.
It begins with the sudden drowning of a well-known investigative journalist for the Washington Post who also happens to be the son of a retired Congressman. It appears accidental enough. But something about it doesn't sit right with the Congressman.
House Speaker John Mahoney has DeMarco check it out and, as you might expect in a political thriller, DeMarco uncovers information, piece by piece, that gets the attention of the C.I.A., spies, political leaders and unsuspecting friends.
Lawson, who makes his home in Magnolia and who has spent a career working with the U.S. Navy in both Bremerton and Washington, D.C., employs all his knowledge about the inner workings of government and the sights and sounds of the beltway to bring this story to life. The antihero, DeMarco, bumbles along without any super sense of deduction or vision or courage for that matter. But he is persistent. He enlists the help of a former spy and gradually, more come aboard to help solve the mystery. DeMarco's nagging curiosity leads the way to advance the plot.
Lawson is a fan of film and TV, and cites a lot of pop culture along the way. His everyman, DeMarco, is a lot like Jimmy McNulty in the HBO series, "The Wire" -a good guy, not power hungry, not exceptionally bright, but loyal to his friends. So it's easy to like DeMarco and get behind him from the get go. Same with his friend, Emma, the former spy whose alpha strain makes her a strong ally in any situation. Their friendship is real and forged through tough situations, which makes the razzing between the two permissible.
Lawson's prose is accessible and the dialog is snappy making for a relatively quick read. However, all too often he doesn't give the reader enough credit to infer a character's motive toward a particular action. Lawson feels compelled to tell a reader why Character A did this and that to Character B and so forth. And some of the dialog, particularly with an inner-city drug dealer and a politician from the South, who are more caricatures than characters, are stereotypical clichés.
But the story is a good one and Lawson fulfills the hallmark of any thriller/mystery writer, which is to keep the reader guessing until the final page is read.
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