On Bookshelves This Spring

Fiction:

Local novelist Keith Donohue’s Angels of Destruction doesn’t waste time: On page one, a nine-year-old girl shows up at the door of a widow whose own daughter disappeared years before. Donohue—who works at the National Archives and once wrote speeches for the National Endowment for the Arts—also wrote the well-received novel The Stolen Child.

Political consultant Peter Schechter’s Pipeline is a thriller entangling characters in Washington, Russia, and Peru over energy and national security. Schechter, a board member of chef José Andrés’s restaurant group, is author of another suspense novel, Point of Entry.

The Girl She Used to Be, by local first-time novelist David Cristofano, is about a young woman who grew up in the Federal Witness Protection Program. The woman has gone through a number of identities when, as an adult, she’s tracked down by a man who knows her real one.

Nonfiction:

Two Washington insiders, former Slate publisher Cliff Sloan and top Senate aide David McKean, team up in The Great Decision to examine the Marbury v. Madison ruling that helped create the modern Supreme Court.

Washington Post contributor Kirstin Downey has a new biography of FDR Labor secretary Frances Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal, which demonstrates that her legacy in Washington extends far beyond the unattractive building on Constitution Avenue that bears her name.

This article first appeared in the March 2009 issue of The Washingtonian. For more articles from that issue, click here.

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Garrett M. Graff