It's an ambitious book, that's for sure.  Husband and wife team Diane Henry and Nicholas Horrock (under the single name of Henry Horrock) take on every type of scandal known to man in Potomac Fever.  No corruption stone is left unturned: sex, race, cover-ups, greedy land-developers, kickback schemes, secrets in the White House, lobbyists with an agenda, drug wars - every nasty headline you've ever seen come out of a Washington D.C. newspaper is somehow brought into this novel.

What you have, when you try to tackle every issue at once, is a convoluted mess.  Luckily the book manages to straighten itself out by the end, but getting through the middle was like trying to follow a single strand, in a giant bowl of spaghetti.

The basic plot line has to do with a couple of crimes in the D.C. area.  The body of a young woman turns up in the river.  Clearly, the woman was tortured before her death.  And, a drive-by shooting leaves a bunch of innocent by-standers dead. 

Detectives Cal and Bobbi are investigating both crimes, and discovering some surprising connections between them.  And the clues keep pointing the detectives higher and higher up the political ladder.  Soon it becomes quite obvious that someone will stop at nothing, to keep these two in the dark about what's really happening behind some of D.C.'s closed doors.

It's not a bad plot.  It's just that there were so many sub-plots, so many characters, and so many things going on at once that is was difficult to keep it all straight.  Further, most of the story is told in flashback, with unmarked jumps back and forth in the timeline.  One frequently had to rely on context to figure out if we were in the past, or the present. 

As for character development, there wasn't much.  I never felt like I really got to know anybody.  Especially Bobbi - she's a complete and total mystery throughout the book.  Considering she's such an integral part of the investigation, it would have been nice if we knew something about her. 

There was violence on top of violence and a few particularly gruesome details regarding the particular type of torture to which the woman was subjected prior to her death.

On the plus side, there were many surprises along the way. Quite a few "a-ha!" moments.  Even I, as jaded a reader as there is, felt a few jolts of shock. 

I would call this an "ok" book - not one I would recommend, but it's also not the worst story you could read.  If you find it sitting on your bookshelf and there's nothing good on TV, go ahead and read it. But don't bother buying it.

Recommended: No