Somebody in Washington is updating Shakespeare. The first thing he wants to do is kill all the lobbyists. Knocking off three of them in consecutive weeks, he's off to a fast start. On the lapel of each victim, the killer leaves a pin that, arguably, resembles Porky Pig.
The Metro police are on the case when Putnam Shady steps forward and identifies the third victim as a friend. Authority averse, Putnam gives the cops only bare bones information-but he tells Margaret 'Sweetie' Sweeney that he thinks he will be the next victim.
The reason, he explains, is quite simple. There are two plans afoot to seize control of the federal government. At the center of one plan is the speaker of the House of Representatives. The group behind the other plan consisted of Putnam and his three dead colleagues.
Sweetie vows to protect Putnam. She enlists Jim McGill, the president's henchman, to find out who is behind the murders. But then McGill's whole world is turned upside down. His son, Kenny, is diagnosed with leukemia.
Always a good sport, Jim McGill, the first private-eye to live in the White House, agrees to accompany his wife, the president, to London to be her escort at a dinner given by the queen-yes, the one who lives in Buckingham Palace. Problem is, he'll have a week in England beforehand, while the president attends a G8 meeting, with nothing to do.
Then a client comes to McGill, the daughter of a former Chicago cop McGill knew but didn't like when he was a captain on the CPD. McGill's former colleague went to Paris to scatter the ashes of his late, French-born wife in the Seine. While tending to that solemn obligation, the former cop managed to get into a brawl with and kill France's national sports hero. The guy from Chicago claims he was only saving a blonde woman from being beaten by the Frenchman, as French law actually required him to do. Only problem is, the blonde has disappeared.
The former cop's daughter asks McGill to find the woman and save her father.
Beats glad-handing the locals in nearby London, he decides. He just has to wrap up the case in time to get to dinner with the president and the queen.
How did former Chicago cop Jim McGill become the first PI to live in the White House? He married Patricia Darden Grant the first woman to become a US President . . . not long after he solved the murder of her first husband.
Winning an election was one thing. Finding work after moving to Washington was another. McGill decided to be his own boss and took out a private investigator's license. That wasn't a politically correct occupation, but then McGill refused to allow himself to be addressed as the First Gentleman.
He nicknamed himself The President's Henchman.
McGill's first case is to find out who is stalking a woman in the White House press corps. Then his wife asks him to be a shadow advisor to a young Air Force investigator looking into a he-said-she-said charge of adultery leveled against a female colonel working at the Pentagon. Both cases have the potential to become politically explosive.
Welcome to Washington, DC.
