Ross Thomas: If You Can't Be Good (USA 1993)

From the Publisher:
If you can't be good, then be as bad as you can be.
That's the credo of a certain crowd living inside the Beltway. Take the ex-Senator whose career ended with a $50,000 bribe for something he would have done -- and actually did -- do for next to nothing.

Take the Senator's drop-dead beaulful mistress, whose past is a shade lighter than sordid. And take an African colonel and high explosives expert who just happens to be on hand when a young woman goes up in orange flames.

These are Deek Lewis' people. Because even though Deek fancies himself an historian, he is really a digger of dirt. In a world where everyone has an angle, a grudge, or a scam, a web of blackmail is coming undone. Now Deek would only like to know: which scammer is also a mastermind of murder?

Ross Thomas: If You Can't Be Good. Mysterious Press / Warner Books, ISBN: 0446401722 (September, 1993), 260 p., $4.99.

Ross Thomas: If You Can't Be Good (USA 1973)

From the Publisher:
Decatur Lucas works for the U.S. government as an unofficial "Cupidity and Corruption Specialist." His job is to root out the truth about various government programs and individuals and submit reports on his findings -- reports that usually result in shake-ups or even scandals, but that are sometimes hushed up.

Frank Size, the most feared man in Washington, is a nationally syndicated columnist who also specializes in cupidity and corruption. One of his columns exposed U.S. Senator Robert F. Ames, claiming that he accepted a $50,000 bribe to make a certain speech on the Senate floor which later resulted in a business merger that favored certain key stockholders. Ames was forced to resign from the Senate, but Frank Size doesn't think the story ends there. Why, for example, would Senator Ames, a wealthy man, accept a bribe to make such a speech?

And what connection, if any, is there be tween his resignation and the fact that he has left his millionaire wife and moved into the Watergate with a stunning twenty seven-year-old blonde? Size wants to know, and he hires Decatur Lucas to dig out the facts. What Lucas finds involves intrigue and murder in one of the most exciting plots you've ever twisted through. Ross Thomas is the established master of the political suspense novel, and he's in top form with If You Can't Be Good.

Ross Thomas: If You Can't Be Good. A Novel. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973, ISBN: 0688001696, 249 p., $6.95.