The United States capital has long been home to ambitious egos and an army of sycophants and influence peddlers. Debut novelist Tom Rosenstiel's Shining City, like a mashup of The West Wing and House of Cards, captures the high stakes political maneuvering behind pushing an iconoclastic Supreme Court nominee through a divisive Senate confirmation hearing.
Conservative Peter Rena ("ex-military, Special Forces, one of those crazy guys who swim across alligator-infested waters to slit your throat") and his liberal partner, Randi Brooks, run a nonpartisan "problem-solver" consulting firm. Charged with thoroughly scrubbing the background of Edmund Roland Madison, they must prep the blunt independent jurist for the inevitable high-profile committee grilling. Meanwhile, the psychopathic brother of a man convicted of murder and rape in Madison's California courtroom is systematically killing the cop, public defender and prosecutor in the case--and his ultimate target is Madison himself.
A former journalist with the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek, Rosenstiel (Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload with Bill Kovach) salts his Washington political thriller with contemporary issues and D.C. characters--like the leader of a look-alike Tea Party caucus who wears a Heritage Foundation T-shirt and takes his coffee in a Cato Institute mug, and "Craggy" Aggie Tucker, "the feral boy senator of Texas." Shining City is a diverting look behind the capital's political curtain with enough barbarity to give it plenty of propulsive juice. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.