Joe DeMarco
3 primary works
Book 10
The young woman is Sarah Johnson, whose grandfather saved Mahoney's life in Vietnam. For the past two years, Sarah has been on a relentless crusade against a billionaire oil tycoon who has profited handsomely from the natural gas boom in the Dakotas--and who she believes has been bribing small-time politicians and judges to keep things in his favor. Though she has no hard evidence against the man, Sarah has been assaulted and received death threats for her meddling. DeMarco, given his years of experience bending the rules in D.C., suspects that a middleman like himself is pulling strings for the tycoon. But as DeMarco tries to identify his adversaries, the situation turns unexpectedly violent, and DeMarco finds himself in a battle of wits against two ruthless problem solvers who will stop at nothing to win.
Book 13
As the fixer for Congressman John Mahoney in Washington, D.C., Joe DeMarco has had to bend and break the law more than a few times. But when Representative Lyle Canton, House Majority Whip, is found shot dead in his office in the U.S. Capitol and DeMarco is arrested for the murder, DeMarco knows he's been framed. Locked up in the Alexandria Jail awaiting trial, he calls on his enigmatic friend Emma, an ex-DIA agent, to search for the true killer.
Emma's investigation leads her to Sebastian Spear, the ruthless and competitive CEO of the multi-billion-dollar Spear Industries. Spear had a motive for killing Lyle Canton: Canton's wife, Jean, had once been Spear's high school sweetheart and the one true love of his life--until Canton won her over. Now Jean was dead, killed in a car crash while driving drunk, and Spear blamed Canton for the accident. But the case the F.B.I. has built against DeMarco is airtight, and not a single piece of evidence points to the grieving CEO. Using her cunning and her D.C. connections, Emma sets out to prove that Spear has been using some fixers of his own.
Featuring crimes of passion, corporate corruption, and partisan feuds, House Arrest is a gripping, timely political thriller, and one of Lawson's best books yet.
Book 14
In House Privilege, the fourteenth novel in the DeMarco series, Mike Lawson sends his likeable protagonist on a journey that begins in Boston and ends up in a country beyond the reach of the law.
Fifteen-year-old Cassie Russell, the only daughter of a mega-rich Boston couple, is the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her parents. She's also the goddaughter of the newly elected Speaker of the House, John Mahoney, and after the crash Mahoney becomes her legal guardian. Normally, Mahoney would send his kind-hearted wife to deal with his new ward, but she's unavailable so he dispatches his fixer, Joe DeMarco, to make sure the girl's okay. DeMarco's job is only to put things into a holding pattern until Mrs. Mahoney is able to step in and take charge--but DeMarco unintentionally flips over a rock and out from under it crawls a lawyer, the one managing Cassie's vast estate. DeMarco learns the lawyer has been embezzling from the estate and may have killed Cassie's parents.
What should have been a simple assignment unleashes murderous plots involving a Boston mob boss and his Irish thugs, and things quickly escalate from there. DeMarco ends up chasing the scheming lawyer halfway around the world to save Cassie and ensure that justice is done. And, this being DeMarco, the legal niceties are mostly ignored.
House Privilege is one of the best instalments yet in Edgar Award-nominee Mike Lawson's long-running series.