Big Ugly - Tapa dura

That night I dreamed of Detective Lieutenant Rudy Solano, my deer-hunting buddy, my fellow crime-fighter, who got me my job as an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. My dead buddy.... Then I saw the money on the bed, I saw the cheap metal bedpost, the bare lightbulb. My one-room apartment....That was the first time I took too much money, money that didn't belong to me. Thanks, Rudy. Then, still in his police uniform, Rudy Solano was a judge, pointing at me, lecturing me: How could you do this? I was a prisoner in the dock, I was on trial.... Solano's face began to sweat and shake, as I had seen it do in life. He fell from the judge's bench, landing in the snow, in hunting clothes covered with blood, as I had found him when Sergeant Gatto drove me up to Jaffrey that Saturday night. I was there, in the snow, in my dream. The yellow tape from the police barrier stuck to my clothes. It was still there the next day when I walked into my office in the Hart Senate Office Building. Everyone was staring at it. How am I going to explain this snow, this tape? Fresh from the scary world of international organized crime in Weld's bestselling and hilarious Mackerel by Moonlight, ex-prosecutor and newly elected senator Terry Mullally, one of the most charming, handsome, and fickle rogues to hit the fiction pages in recent memory, finds that his old enemies may still have murder on their minds and that new ones are laying traps for him. In his first novel, which Kirkus described as "Primary Colors meets George V. Higgins," and People magazine called "a blisteringly funny suspense tale," we followed Mullally's rise from assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn to district attorney in Massachusetts to the U.S. Senate. Now he has married and is madly in love with the gorgeous widow of a shady murdered businessman, trying to shed the mobsters and cops who know his secrets and find his way through a new minefield. With good reason, Mullally sees danger everywhere. Does his wife know what he has done to get where he is? Does the new head of the criminal division of the Justice Department? Will the whole world? Mullally is quickly drawn into the schemes of loose money and political vendettas. Two of his fellow Democratic senators are vying for his support in the primaries of 2000, but Mullally admires the maverick Republican vice president, Martha Holloway, who also wants to be president. He has a lot of balls to keep in the air. Fast-paced, funny, sexy, Big Ugly follows the insouciant Mullally as he pulls off another surprise ending to save his precious skin.

William F. Weld is the author of Mackerel by Moonlight. A former two-term governor of Massachusetts, he served as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts and as head of the Justice Department's criminal division in Washington during the Reagan administration. He lives in Boston and New York.