As a newspaper reporter with 15 years of my own experience covering Washington, D.C., including the White House, I am always leery of the authenticity of stories about journalists covering the nation's capital. Last television season, I was hugely surprised at the quality of the television series, The West Wing, and this summer, I was swept away by Brian McGrory's improbable and thoroughly engaging debut thriller, The Incumbent.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at McGrory's sure hand in steering his story around Washington politics. He is the former White House correspondent and now a columnist for the Boston Globe. Pretty good credentials. But knowing where to go doesn't automatically translate into the ability to write a story that will encourage readers to go with you.

McGrory's followers should be legion.

Jack Flynn, White House correspondent for the fictional Boston Record, is researching a story on presidential pardons. He has asked for an interview with President Clayton Hutchins to talk about Hutchins' recent pardon of Robert Stemple, a participant in the robbery of an armored car in 1979 in which a guard was killed.

Flynn is shocked when Hutchins, taking a break from his re-election campaign, invites Jack to talk to him while playing a round of golf. He's even more stunned when Hutchins offers him a post-election post as press secretary and senior adviser.

As the two of them battle out of the same sand trap, shots are fired. Both Hutchins and Flynn are wounded, though neither critically. As Flynn recovers in a hospital bed, he receives an anonymous phone call from a well-spoken man who warns him that he will hear many things in the coming days about the circumstances surrounding the shooting, and none of them will be the truth. Flynn must find a way to cut through the lies.

Flynn's editor teams him with Steve Havlicek, a veteran investigative reporter Flynn admires without reserve, and between them, they discover that the man identified as the would-be assassin, whom the Secret Service killed with six shots to the head, isn't who the FBI claims he is and that a mysterious man named Curtis Black is the key to the mystery.

Along the way to resolution, Flynn must deal with two duplicitous FBI agents who might be working against each other or as a team to stop his investigative progress. His mysterious caller keeps in touch, but is of little help except to encourage him. He is shot at again and warned that the dangers will continue to escalate if he continues to delve into this story.

Can't tell you any more except the denouement is extraordinary, and when McGrory could have taken the easy, cliched way out of the story, he sidestepped the temptation and went for a resolution far more realistic and satisfying.

The Incumbent is a wild ride with some wonderfully drawn secondary characters, particularly a lowlife named Markowitz who owns a Boston bar called the Pigpen. There is nothing about this book not to like, except it isn't my name on the cover. But that's my problem.

Jean Heller is the author of the mystery-thrillers Handyman and Maximum Impact (Forge/Tom Doherty Associates)

The Incumbent

By Brian McGrory

Pocket Books, $24.95

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