POLITICAL SUICIDE

The latest from versatile Russell (Exposure, 2002, etc.) teams a small-time hotel auditor with a celebrity daughter out to avenge her father’s death.

Ever since getting bounced from West Point, Will Travis, of the Last Resort, has made a career as an invisible observer who can take in every detail of a restaurant’s service without being noticed himself. That way, he can check on hospitality employees to make sure they’re working hard at their jobs without fleecing their customers. One night Will is sitting inconspicuously at the bar at a Chesapeake Bay inn when, noticing a woman getting the bum’s rush from a fellow diner, he follows the couple outside and steps into a hornet’s nest. Claire Harrington, the woman he saves from death, is convinced that her father wasn’t so lucky—that his alleged suicide was really a murder orchestrated by one of the five presidential candidates now barnstorming the country. Rep. Garret Harrington, his daughter insists, had gotten dirt so damning on one of the five that he had to be silenced by conspirators who how have their sights trained on Claire and her unwitting protector. Pursued, inevitably, by both villains and cops, the couple find in St. Garret’s unpublished memoir a virtual encyclopedia of hush-hush duels, affairs, and suicides from American history, and can only pray that their fate won’t become its last chapter.

Some neat twists toward the end refresh the fleet, staple everyone’s-against-us plot.