I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have some strong political feelings. Among my friends are one vocal Bush-supporter, several active in the effort to elect Kerry, and a few who have become so disgusted with the entire political process that they refuse to participate at all. Even those who are ambivalent are passionate about it, and spend a lot of time wrestling with the issues. The only place I don’t see politics is between the covers of the contemporary romance novels I read. Many romance authors are, I think, afraid of turning away half of their audience if they come down on one side or another. I find it extremely refreshing to read a novel (not a romance, alas) that takes a stand.

The issue Michelle Mitchell takes up is the balance between national security and personal freedom. How far is the government allowed to go in protecting us from harm? When there’s a question of treason, does one person’s civil liberty really matter?

Kate Boothe is a political consultant in Washington, D.C. who takes on a doozy of a client. A reporter named Lyle Gold has been indicted on charges of treason. It seems that Gold leaked the locations of U.S. Special Forces to a member of the Chinese embassy; to make matters worse, the member of the Chinese embassy in turn passed those secrets on to the Pakistanis. The entire nation has united in its passionate denunciation of the perfidious Gold. As one savvy character says, “This is all about being patriotic… It’s a scandal we can all feel good about, even puff ourselves up with superiority. No one’s felt that way about themselves in a long while. Nothing seems to be going right – except that this bad guy has been caught red-handed.”

So why does Kate take on the challenge of exonerating Lyle Gold, at least in the court of public opinion? She’s hardly his biggest fan; she dated the man once, and he dumped her. But she gets a whiff that something isn’t right here. The rush to judge Gold seems to hasty; he seems too convenient a scapegoat. And of course, since Gold is going to be tried by a military tribunal, no one really knows what the evidence actually is. Determined to right a wrong, Kate plunges in.

The fallout is horrific. Kate is vilely attacked in the press, personally assaulted, betrayed by friends. She receives dying roses, death threats, and a summons before a grand jury. And still she perseveres, bloodied but not broken, as she becomes more and more convinced that Gold has been framed, and that high-level officials are conspiring to cover up the real culprit.

The nicest thing about this book is its heroine. Kate is a smart, self-aware, determined professional. At the outset of this book, Kate is more than halfway in love with a man, but she sacrifices that relationship up in order to pursue the Gold case. She has a lot of regrets about that, but Kate thinks that her job is important, and not just to herself. Unlike most romance novel heroines, she spends most of her time working. You can tell that this is not a romance novel because Kate’s business partner, Jack, is a good-looking, smart, single straight man, and she never even once entertains romantic thoughts about him. She is, in short, the kind of women I wish more romance novels were written about.

Mitchell was a political analyst at CNN News, and she knows her way around the Washington scene. The characters in her book are all fictitious, but some of them bear a striking resemblance to real people. Take, for instance, the outspoken right-wing radio commentator, whose popularity has declined a bit since the discovery of his drug habit (in the book his name is Truman Pace). I’m a small-town girl, not really clued-up on politics’ who’s who, so there are several equally penetrating little portraits that, alas, I could not place. On the other hand, I was a history major, and I did immediately recognize the real event that this novel’s plot is based upon. I won’t reveal it here, since other history fans will enjoy figuring it out for themselves. The author rewards us for doing so with a cookie, in the name of one of Gold’s most prominent defenders.

I have a few nitpicks about this book. In the opening chapters especially, before things start getting good, the author’s writing style is a bit clumsy; she seems to be straining for a breezy style, and the result is mere vagueness. “I don’t need to remind anyone,” she writes, “of The Moment when we literally collapsed into the next era.” No, but you do need to tell us what you’re talking about. (I belatedly realized that she’s referring to September 11, 2001; why not be specific?) That vagueness clears up pretty quickly, fortunately. More disappointing is the way the novel ends. The espionage plot sort of peters out, with a conclusion that felt insufficient. This might indeed be the way such a scandal would end in Washington, but satisfying fiction demands some sort of satisfying resolution. As a romance reader in particular, I like a feel-good finale. I didn’t really get one here, and that’s the main thing that kept this book from receiving DIK status.

I do recommend The Latest Bombshell, though. It is a highly entertaining novel and a wonderful study of the way things get done (and don’t get done, as the case may be) in Washington. I’m hoping that Kate Boothe becomes a recurring character.