Damage Control

 Damage Control by Robert Dugoni is the fifth novel that I’ve read and reviewed. While I really liked two of his novels and was only luke warm about the other two, I had this book in my Kindle and decided to give it a go, and I’m grateful that I did. 

The protagonist is Dana Hill, a talented lawyer who worked for a monster of a boss in Seattle. Dana had so many things going wrong in her life besides a bad boss. Her marriage was failing, her father who was also a very successful lawyer died while he was in the middle of an infidelity, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and then her twin brother was killed. It made no sense to anyone that someone would murder her brother James. He had become a lawyer mostly to please his father, but he hated the work. He chose to quickly get out of the rat trap that he made for himself, sold everything that he owned, and eventually decided to lead as simple and cheap life as he could while earning enough to live by being a law professor. In the last couple years, both Dana and her twin had grown more distant from one another. She was busy and he was rather aloof, but she began to investigate what his life had been. She thought her twin was happy but was aware that he had begun to lead his life very close to the breast. Dana discovered that James had been having an affair with a woman he had known in law school who was currently the wife of the governor of Washington State. According to the press, Robert Meyers and his wife Elizabeth were the darlings that rightly belonged in the White House. Become president had been the lifelong ambition of Robert and in fact, he announced his candidacy in the course of the story. He had married Elizabeth because she fit the image of just such a woman. He was actually an ambitious narcissist and sociopath, but few people were aware of those traits, and he played at the role of returning the country to Camelot with Robert and Elizabeth in the White House, sort of like Jack and Jackie.

 

It was Dana’s investigation that led to the discovery of the affair, and she figured out that it was the governor who had ordered James murder so the affair would not have a negative impact on his election. The story told by Dugoni mostly was about Dana managing her many life challenges while carrying on her investigation and then her hunt for clues to prove the governor’s guilt. The plot and characters were excellent and believable. This is a five-star story and it gets my strongest recommendation.