Dating the First Daughter Can Engulf a Guy in Murder

At the start of Brad Meltzer’s new thriller, “The First Counsel” (Warner, 481 pages, $25.95), an agreeable young White House lawyer named Michael Garrick is experiencing the pleasure and pain of a date with the president’s daughter. Nora Hartford is stunningly beautiful, bright and sexy, and--of no small matter to an ambitious political wonk--capable of sending his career into orbit. The downside is that she’s a bit twisted, quickly ditching her Secret Service guards and dragging him into a disastrous misadventure that eventually finds him being hunted by the FBI as the prime suspect in a series of murders.

Most crime novels based on celebrity-driven concepts, especially those featuring members of the first family, have a hard time getting over fiction’s biggest hurdle, the suspension of disbelief, even when they carry the byline of a former First Daughter. Of all the “Dead Bodies in the White House” novels and films that have appeared in the last several years, only one has had the aura of authenticity: “Paramour,” a suspenseful tale involving a president’s mistress. (It had the advantage of being written by Gerald Petievich, not only a superb novelist but also a former member of the Secret Service with firsthand knowledge of presidential ways.)

Meltzer builds up a certain amount of credibility with convincingly detailed descriptions of the interior of the White House, from Oval Office to the underground tunnel rumored to have been used by Marilyn Monroe and other unheralded visitors. But what makes “Counsel” click is the cleverness with which the author has crafted his hapless young hero.

The product of an unusual childhood (his father is learning-impaired; his mother, now deceased, was ostracized by her well-to-do-family), Garrick suffers from conflicting excesses of empathy and suspicion. That’s a perilous combination for someone on the run, especially when his salvation depends on deciding whether the president’s daughter is trying to save him or serve him up.

Though Meltzer brings his novel to a satisfactory, if melodramatic, conclusion, there are a few questions--mainly involving the villain’s access to victims--that are left unanswered. The biggest remaining mystery, however, is why the book’s cover depicts a snow-covered, wintry White House when paragraph two of the book clearly sets the time and temperature with a description of “warm, early-September air.”

*

Another likable, perplexed young hero has arrived this month in Edgar-winning author Thomas Perry’s witty and action-packed “Death Benefits” (Random House, 395 pages, $24.95). Like the other entry-level employees of the San Francisco-based McClaren Life & Casualty, data analyst John Walker is curious about Max Stillman, the gruff, mysterious newcomer whom the bosses have given free run of the office. Unlike his associates, he’s picked by Stillman as a lunch partner and, eventually, as an assistant in the investigation of a multimillion-dollar insurance scam emanating from the firm’s Pasadena office. Is the fact that a girlfriend of Walker’s has gone missing from that branch the reason for his recruitment, or does the enigmatic Stillman have an even more devious motive?

Recently, Perry has been concentrating on books featuring Jane Whitefield, an expert in keeping bad things from happening to good people by helping them to disappear into new identities. As excellent as that series is, I’ve missed his equally inventive, darkly humorous crime capers, in which he bedevils his protagonists with almost sadistic glee. “Benefits” is just the ticket. The rugged, always-resourceful Stillman never gives Walker an even break. He drags the befuddled youth around the country, pushing him into situations that are embarrassing or dangerous or both. The scam is ingenious, the thrills come fast and furious, but it’s the developing relationship between the hardened old pro and his reluctant but pliable protege that distinguishes this superbly crafted novel.

For those readers who haven’t yet had their fill of mass murderers, I should note the arrival of the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (Checkmark Books, 391 pages, $19.95), a large softcover compendium assembled by true-crime author Michael Newton. From the “Angel Makers of Nagyrev” (50 housewives in a small Hungarian village who turned husband-poisoning into a fad in the 1920s) to Anna Maria Zwanziger (a footloose house servant who traveled through Germany and Austria back in the mid-18th century, treating her patrons to arsenic as sugar substitute), the book features a Guinness Record-worthy literary body count. Its descriptive overkill should prompt mystery writers to move on to some less familiar form of villainy, but, alas, it’ll probably serve as inspiration instead.

*

The Times reviews mystery books every other week. Next week: Rochelle O’Gorman reviews audio books.