Title: Fatal Legislation
Author: Ellen Butler
Date: 2018
Publisher: Power to the Pen
ISBN: 978-0-99841935-0
Quote: "For an overweight man in his early seventies, he walked at a relatively brisk pace."
Little does Karina, a lobbyist generally in favor of more tax funding for more expensive drugs, know that Senator Harper's brisk pace is being stepped up by a hacked pacemaker. (An Internet of Things makes it theoretically possible that not even your worst enemy, but perhaps a malfunctioning thermostat or washing machine, could hack your pacemaker. I may need one, some day; I don't think I'll want one.) And the underground tram has been diverted. And the guards who should be watching the tunnels have been distracted. Senator Harper is about to die at Karina's feet and, because she tries to use his cellphone to call for help and carelessly sweeps it into her bag with her personal junk, she's a suspect--a red herring the police can smell a mile away, but still...
Most of fictional Washington accepts that it was just Senator Harper's time to go, and Karina keeps it a secret that she was trying to summon help while she watched him die, when another Senator's chauffeur mysteriously rams their car into a train. A Cabinet Secretary Karina's never liked will join the body count, too, before Karina can prove that these people are being murdered because they've supported legislation she supported too.
Political points are scored--the fictional President is still a "tweeter in chief" and, in the splendid real-world tradition of haters showing the world how profoundly confused they always were, a man with a Nazi screen name turns out to be Israeli--as Karina and her realistically mixed collection of friends fight crime with the valor of a fluffy house cat who has just seen the opportunity of a lifetime to show the world how brave he really is. Like the cat, they ought by rights to get killed, but from sheer surprise at their daring they'll win. They'll be safe because the dear old Post will publicize their whistle-blowing until the whole city has their backs. And here's to tax-funded overpriced drugs for all.
If you like a fast-moving mystery with lots of physical danger but only one shooting (of a side-view mirror), Fatal Legislation is for you. It's a worthwhile reminder that, although our legislators can pay for better security than the average person, there can be reasons why they don't dare to stir a wing, open a mouth, or cheep. Usually the reasons have more to do with campaign funds and benefits than with physical terror, but some corporate goons are desperate enough to hire horribly competent assassins. We never know.
It's been a few years since (in the 1970s) a man with enemies in high places reportedly shot himself in the head a few times before feeling desperate enough to chain himself to weights and sink himself in the Potomac, and the case was officially ruled a suicide, case closed. But it did happen. And the dear old Post that would have defied the corporate goons, once, and publicized things like the harassment of Karen Kingston or the deliberate poisoning of me, sold out to the said corporate goons with the "Trusted News Initiative," which is best explained as "If you've not seen a hard-hitting story about glyphosate in a newspaper recently, don't trust it, don't buy it, and don't read it."
Meanwhile, Butler's book was a bestseller and boosted its series up Amazon's charts, and Butler put it on Book Funnel free of charge because she wants blog readers to know that she's done other series, too, historical spy stories and romantic comedies and more. It's all fiction but it all shows a pleasant obsession with fact-checking.
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