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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House Arrest by Mike Lawson

Published by Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press on February 5, 2019

House Arrest is, I think, the thirteenth Joe DeMarco novel. I haven’t kept up with the series because I can’t read everything, and the couple I did read struck me as being okay but nothing special. House Arrest, on the other end, is a book I truly enjoyed.

DeMarco is a lawyer who does off-the-books projects of various kinds for John Mahoney, the Democratic majority leader in the House. He’s occasionally loaned to other politicians who need help. The books are set in the current political world (it is clear that the unnamed president in this book is Trump and that the unnamed House Speaker is Paul Ryan), but the key political characters are fictional. The novel takes place before the 2018 midterms, so Republicans still control the House.

As the novel opens, someone wearing a wig and a Capitol Police uniform kills Congressman Lyle Canton, the Republican Whip, in his Capitol office. Nobody liked Canton, but his biggest enemy was Sebastian Spear, a billionaire who had an affair with Canton’s wife before she got drunk and drove into a tree.

Joe DeMarco was in his office in the subbasement of the Capitol when the murder occurred. An FBI agent interviews him and finds his explanation for being in his office late on a Friday night unconvincing. It doesn’t help that DeMarco’s father was a Mafia hit man and that the FBI can’t figure out what DeMarco’s job is. A search of his office reveals evidence that links him to Canton’s murder. A dozen heavily armed agents in full body armor smash into DeMarco’s home as he’s making dinner and, as the novel’s title suggests, place him under arrest.

It’s good to have friends in high places, including the House leader of the Democratic Party. While Joe languishes in jail, his friend Emma, a retired-but-still-active spook with the DIA, pulls some strings and takes a look at the formidable evidence accumulated by the FBI. But even friends in high places might be an inadequate shield when DeMarco is attacked by prisoners attached to MS-13.

The novel rather drastically changes DeMarco’s life, in that his career has always depended on keeping a law profile. After his arrest for killing a congressman, DeMarco is front page news and will not be able to play the same invisible role for his boss. Whether he will even have a job depends on the election result, which Mike Lawson notes in an afterword was unknown to him when he finished writing the book. Series fans can breathe a sigh of relief that DeMarco might not be evicted from his basement office.

DeMarco actually lurks in the background (he’s either in jail or in a hospital bed) during most of the novel, but Lawson managed to craft a tight, imaginative plot without him. When DeMarco finally returns to action, the story reaches a satisfying climax. The DeMarco novels I’ve read have been uneven, which is why I haven’t tried to read them all. House Arrest, however, benefits from a creative plot that encouraged me to renew my interest in the series.

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