Galileo

Description

Tim Donovan is a Catholic priest with a guilty conscience―though not in the way you’d guess. And Katherine Donne is a Parisian socialite who long ago kicked her self-respect to the curb―for good and for ill. And much closer, we have a group of men whose fortunes, graying temples and positions in life are distinguished and enviable. But their morals? Anything but. And that’s where Evan Reed comes in. Evan (short for Evangeline) is a highly principled political operative with an imperfect past, tasked with uncovering compromising material on a rotten judge up for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court before he can be rushed through confirmation. Evan knows it won't be simple to find damaging information against the judge because he's been vetted many times before. When Evan pulls the string after an interview with a cryptic madman, she finds herself struggling to solve a puzzle that gets more complex by the hour. And where crime, money, conscience, and greed come together, danger is sure to lurk. In this sequel to Dust, Ann McMan takes the reader on an intense journey into a world that lies just beneath the thin veneer of civilization―a world teeming with power struggles and warped desires, and a subculture of promises made, kept, and broken. As Evan pushes further into peril, her personal life sparks into flame with the increasing presence of the ravishing Julia Donne, a book publisher with a progressive bent and troubling questions about her late father. McMan’s specialty of intertwining a hot romance into heart-pounding suspense just keeps getting better and better.

Description

"When it comes to finding dirt, Evan Reed is the best in the business--she’s a dust-buster, a paid operative hired to vet candidates, political appointees, and judicial nominees. Two years have passed since the unsavory events in Dust. Evan Reed is still cranky, but she’s also dealing with the nagging effects of a gunshot wound. Her teenage daughter, Stevie has a new discovery to share, and Stevie’s father, Dan, has married a woman half his age. Evan’s childhood pal, Father Tim, has started questioning his faith, and Evan’s relationship with publishing magnate, Julia Donne has all the earmarks of heading somewhere special. The holidays are fast approaching when Evan is hired by the DNC to do dig up any undiscovered opposition research on the president’s controversial nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. For starters, she has to work at light speed because the Senate is fast-tracking the nomination--and the judge, who is a darling of the far-right, is an avowed constructionist with a highly vetted paper trail nine miles long. The job begins to get murky when Evan discovers a link between the nominee and a now half-crazed, disgraced former U.S. senator who Evan was hired to vet many years ago. The stigma of that episode led Evan to vow to never work again for political kingmaker, Marcus Goldman, whose sticky fingerprints are all over this case. And to make matters worse, Evan’s personal Moriarty, Maya Jindal, reappears--up to her shapely eyebrows in the middle of an expanding web of lies, secrets, and betrayals that shrouds everything in Evan’s life with hopelessness and uncertainty. The case takes an even more dangerous and eerily personal turn as Evan’s descent into the fetid subterranean world of vested interests, dark money PACs, and barbaric private rituals threatens to explode everything she thought she knew about Father Tim, her own conflicted religious beliefs, and any shot she might have at a happy future with the Julia."--

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