House Privilege by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on July 7, 2020

Mike Lawson’s Joe DeMarco novels amuse the hell out of me. DeMarco is a fixer for the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, who as a result of the last election is about to resume his role as speaker. DeMarco doesn’t care about politics or much of anything other than golf. He’s a nonpracticing lawyer who hopes he can hang onto his fixer gig long enough to retire with a government pension, allowing him to spend all his time golfing rather than most of it. Violent circumstances keep interfering with the easy life he wants to lead. Those circumstances combine with DeMarco’s long-suffering attitude to fuel entertaining novels that are surprisingly light, given the number of mobsters, sleezy politicians, crooked lawyers, and sociopaths who populate the pages.

Congressman John Mahoney has a teenage goddaughter named Cassie. Mahoney’s wife adores Cassie but Mahoney pretty much ignores her, as he does anyone who can’t help him gain more power. Cassie’s parents die in a plane crash that almost kills Cassie, leaving Cassie with a trust fund that has been managed by a lawyer who inherited the job from her father, another lawyer who was a friend of Cassie’s father.

Until Mahoney’s wife can get back from a friend’s funeral, Mahoney wants DeMarco to figure out what Cassie might need. DeMarco doesn’t develop much of a rapport with the teenage girl or the nanny who is taking care of her or the lawyer who is managing her trust. None of them are as interesting to DeMarco as the Boston bartender he starts dating while he’s checking up on Cassie. DeMarco becomes suspicious, however, when an accountant who was auditing the trust is killed in a convenience store robbery. The series of suspicious deaths leads DeMarco to one of Boston’s most powerful mobsters.

House Privilege tells a good story at a steady pace. Eventually DeMarco chases a criminal around Montenegro, a country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., in a series of chapters that accelerate the story’s action. Many of the laughs in House Privilege are unexpected, as when a character lies down in a jail cell and wonders why there is blood on the ceiling.

The DeMarco novels remind me of John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers novels. The books are good beach reads, mixing a fun plot with a likable protagonist who is always a bit disappointed in the world he navigates. Not all of the DeMarco novels have been as good as the last two, but at the age of 76, Lawson seems to be hitting his stride.

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