Kit Marshall has bounced back from her first brush with the law, when she was suspected of murdering her senator boss.
Book 2 of the Washington Whodunit series, which began with Stabbing in the Senate..
Solving this murder will test Kit\'s courage and all her fledgling powers of deduction as she roams a spooky, sparsely populated Capitol Hill looking for clues and sounding out suspects.
Dixon\'s career may be over if the police declare her a suspect or an anonymous blogger known as Hill Rat breaks the story.
To save her job, Kit must clear her boss\'s name, and quickly.
This item was entrusted to Dixon at the time, leading the police to believe they\'ve found their killer.
The murder weapon was the Speaker\'s gavel.
Early one morning Representative Dixon is caught standing over the corpse of Jack Drysdale, the Speaker of the House\'s top staffer, a man she argued with in front of the press the day before.
Bad as things are now, they are about to get much worse.
Kit\'s best friend Meg is up to her eyeballs with her new beau and oversight committee job, and Clarence the beagle mix will certainly not win Capitol Canine if Meg has to campaign for him all by herself.
Then there\'s Kit\'s distracted live-in boyfriend, Doug, who doesn\'t seem any closer to popping the question.
A government shutdown has just been announced, wreaking havoc on the Hill, and Dan, Dixon\'s chief of staff and Kit\'s supervisor, is an inexperienced lightweight flying blind.
It\'s February, and Kit is feeling out of sorts.
Now she is working for a freshman congresswoman, Maeve Dixon, a young Gulf War veteran representing North Carolina.
Kit Marshall has bounced back from her first brush with the law, when she was suspected of murdering her senator boss
