CUT AND THRUST

First lady Katharine Rule Lee’s quest for the Democratic nomination to succeed her husband unleashes all sorts of mostly unrelated complications for the mostly familiar cast.

When you’re tight with someone like New York attorney Stone Barrington (Carnal Curiosity, 2014, etc.), you’re likely to brush up against lots of interesting people. Same thing when you share the president’s bed. And her tenure as CIA director has made Kate enemies of her own. So it’s no surprise that senators from New Mexico and Virginia are ready to fight her tooth and nail for the nomination and not much bigger a surprise when Secret Service agent Mervin Beam, head of the Los Angeles office, shows Stone a death threat against her he’s received. Stone, in LA to keep Kate’s deputy campaign manager, Ann Keaton, company during the convention, is on hand when his son, Peter, the rising star of Centurion Studios, signs Susannah Wilde for a pivotal character role in his new movie, angering Charlene Joiner, the president’s ex-lover, who thought she had the part sewn up. Susannah’s husband, Ed Eagle, a New Mexico delegate to the convention, is worried once again that his ex-wife, Barbara, now married to a London auto dealer, is gunning for him, and once again he’s right. If Barbara can’t kill Ed by hiring an Army veteran to blow up his private jet, she’s prepared to launch a smear campaign that will accuse him of repeatedly plotting to kill her. And of course disaffected ex–CIA op Teddy Fay, now reborn as Peter’s associate producer, Billy Burnett, is keeping an eye on Barbara just in case the wheels of justice don’t grind fine enough.

The political convention as family reunion, with lots of drama, no sustained plot and all the regulars acting pretty much as you’d expect.