Mackerel by Moonlight

Not long after 32-year-old Terrence Mullally takes a job with a Boston law firm, having been forced from his position in Brooklyn as a federal prosecutor, he gets tapped to take on the incumbent in the upcoming race for DA. His major qualifications he's ""the available man."" Soon, Mullally's sucking up to Boston blue bloods with the best of them, courting a married lady and spinning everything the way spin doctors advise. Debut novelist Weld, himself the former governor of Massachusetts and a former federal prosecutor, has written a funny and suspenseful satire of American politics, in which corruption is ""the grease of daily life... everybody knows, nobody cares."" Considering Mullally's checkered past (to say how checkered would be giving too much away), readers will wonder what business he has running for public office at all, given the anti-corruption platform on which he runs. He knows, however, that in the political fray, truth is never a consideration; expediency and sound bites are the guiding principles. Granting Mullally a cheerfully cynical voice, Weld offers frank accounts of how attorneys, cops and politicians bend ethics and laws. Despite a few longueurs in some descriptions of political infighting, the story has wit, energy and fine detail, as well as knowledgeable asides (""the old Abe Fortas trick""). The plotting is adroit, as Weld interweaves the machinations of the political campaign, dark revelations about Mullally's past, and the candidate's romance with pragmatic, hard-drinking and sexually freewheeling Emma Gallaudette. The surprising denouement bears out the narrative's message that corruption is endemic to society, ""like a mackerel in moonlight. It shines and it stinks."" First serial to George. (Sept.)