THE ASSET

Influential Congressman John Mahoney gets a rare chance to neutralize a long-standing enemy that sounds too good to be true—because it is.

Acting on information he’s received from Diane Lake, of Vicount Analytics, Mahoney wants longtime fixer Joe DeMarco to determine whether Lydia Chang, the much younger wife of Sen. Douglas “Dutch” McMillian, has really been meeting with Zhou Enlai, an intelligence officer at D.C.’s Chinese embassy, whom Diane claims has pressed Lydia to become an agent for the Chinese government. Diane doesn’t want the publicity that would come from outing Lydia, and since Dutch routinely spars with Mahoney on every imaginable front, she figures it’s a great opportunity for him. As DeMarco quickly discovers, however, the situation is more complicated than that. Lydia has indeed been meeting Zhou, and she and her daughter, Jenny, are both walking on thin ice, subject to all kinds of pressure about a potentially compromising secret they’re keeping. But DeMarco’s friend Mike McGuire, a former CIA agent, doesn’t think the plot smells like a Chinese operation at all. He thinks it’s being engineered by the Russians or the CIA itself. As it turns out, he’s right about the first part but wrong about the second. As usual, Lawson keeps the story moving as fast as a runaway rocket, seamlessly changing gears from “What’s going on?” to “What can we do about it?” to “How can we keep it quiet?” to “How will our attempts compare to our enemy’s?” while implicating more bad actors at every turn.

Readers mourning the death of Thomas Perry are advised to try Lawson’s equally deadpan political thrillers, beginning here.