The Solomon Scandals is David Rothman's Washington novel with a 'tude to go along with the suspense. Scandals treats D.C. as a white-collar factory town. Its satire is unsparing about the nuts and bolts of political corruption, in addition to the media variety. The protagonist, a young reporter named Jonathan Stone, has pitted himself against one of the Washington Telegram's major advertisers. Seymour Solomon is a real estate tycoon?an ex-bricklayer with two fingertips missing but a knack for bringing powerful D.C. insiders into his business ventures. Along the way Stone lives through CIA skulduggery; the threatened collapse of an IRS building, with hundreds inside; D.C.-quirky sex scandals; a gossip columnist's suicide; and the death of a sharklike editor in a car bombing. Stone's partner in crime or anti-crime is Margo Danielson. A medieval studies grad from Oberlin, she is a reluctant bureaucrat trapped within the Augean Stables of the General Services Administration. Scandals is fiction, but was inspired partly by the Skyline collapse in Northern Virginia where dozens were killed or injured. In a review of Scandals, the Washington City Paper says that "we get to relish his chatty first-person narrator spinning characterizations of D.C. with the same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles." Scandals is available as both a trade paperback and an electronic book, and of the latter, the City Paper observes: "It?s hard to call an e-book a page-turner--novels like The Solomon Scandals require a new word."