The Solomon Scandals

Jon Stone is a Spinoza-loving reporter with a rationalist's need to see the world as it is, not as Washington's elite would prefer to print it. He is already digging into the campaign donations of Seymour Solomon, a real estate magnate, when one of Solomon's high-rises collapses in Northern Virginia, killing hundreds. An ex-bricklayer who left fingertips behind on the job, Solomon learned how to pour concrete, move money, and make problems disappear. Now he's a philanthropist, too, with friends in Georgetown and the White House, and Stone's reporting pits him against Washington's unholy triad of media, government, and big business, where everyone knows who not to cross. As Stone pushes deeper, he discovers that the people closest to him may be the ones most determined to stop him. The Solomon Scandals is a complex character-driven thriller on political corruption, family tension, and betrayal, set in a 1970s Washington where respectability and virtue are often oceans apart. "We get to relish his chatty first-person narrator ... the same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles." -- Ted Scheinman, Washington City Paper "Captures the aura of dark nihilism in some quarters of the political world with great power ... This is a riveting work, mordantly insightful and surprisingly entertaining." -- Kirkus Reviews INSPIRED BY REAL EVENTS David Rothman's reporting exposed a U.S. senator's hidden investment in a CIA-occupied building, made the NBC Nightly News, and helped trigger a congressional investigation. He is a Washington-area native. Ted Scheinman, reviewing Rothman's first edition for the Washington City Paper, wrote: "We get to relish his chatty first-person narrator spinning characterizations of D.C. with the same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles." Kirkus Reviews says the second edition "captures the aura of dark nihilism in some quarters of the political world with great power … This is a riveting work, mordantly insightful and surprisingly entertaining."