The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Overview of ‘The Solomon Scandals’

The Solomon Scan­dals is fic­ti­tious but draws inspi­ra­tion from reality.

U.S. Sen­a­tor Abra­ham Ribi­coff actu­ally held a hid­den invest­ment in a CIA-occupied build­ing, and 14 work­ers died in the Sky­line high-rise col­lapse at Bailey’s Cross­roads in North­ern Vir­ginia. In the left photo via Google, you can see the Key Build­ing, in Arling­ton, where Ribi­coff secretly owned a stake.

The Sy Solomon in the title is a for­mer brick­layer turned real estate tycoon who leases acres and acres of office space to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. Tens of thou­sands of bureau­crats work in his build­ings. He has two fin­ger­tips miss­ing, but scores and scores of pow­er­ful friends in the White House and on Capi­tol Hill. “Decency,” Solomon says when asked about his cam­paign dona­tions to Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats alike, “it’s the first thing I look for in a politi­cian. Please, try to under­stand. Do you want another Watergate?”

The plot heats up when Jon Stone, the reporter pro­tag­o­nist, dis­cov­ers that Solomon has stinted on con­struc­tion of the Vulture’s Point com­plex on the Potomac River, and he risks his career to try to get the story of the threat­ened col­lapse into the Wash­ing­ton Telegram before the build­ing can fall down. Along the way, he is aided by Margo Danial­son, a medieval stud­ies major trapped within the bureau­cracy at the Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion, the agency Solomon has bought off.

In his inves­ti­ga­tion, Stone must strug­gle with resis­tance from his own father, who works for a PR and lob­by­ing firm rep­re­sent­ing a bank that has financed Solomon’s projects.

So does the build­ing col­lapse with IRS and CIA work­ers inside, and what comes to light about it and the peo­ple involved? Does George McWilliams, Jon’s edi­tor, have any con­nec­tion with Vulture’s Point, beyond his social ties with Solomon? And what about Stone’s friend Wendy Blevin, the Vassar-educated gos­sip colum­nist? Is her roman­tic life in some way linked to the build­ing and the scan­dals behind it?

If you’re famil­iar at all with Wash­ing­ton and its ways, you’ll nod at the obser­va­tions that Scan­dals makes. This D.C. is not the mys­ti­cal city—of white stone mon­u­ments and secret ceremonies—that one reviewer saw in The Lost Sym­bol by Dan Brown. Instead it is the city of lawyers and lob­by­ists, strate­gi­cally tar­geted cam­paign gifts, and other “prac­ti­cal” con­cerns. “I remem­bered the stares we had drawn, when we’d dined two weeks ear­lier at Chez François, from a forty­ish meso­morph in a thousand-dollar suit,” Stone says of a meal with an old girl­friend. “Might he have been gaug­ing the worth of my Garfinckel’s attire and his chances of out­bid­ding me? Women, real estate, and legislation—the holy trin­ity of the Wash­ing­ton marketplace.”

Rec­om­mend­ing Scan­dals, the Wash­ing­ton City Paper says that “we get to rel­ish his [Rothman’s] chatty first-person nar­ra­tor spin­ning char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of D.C. with the same dark zeal Ham­mett held for Frisco or Chan­dler had for Los Ange­les.” Scan­dals is avail­able as both a trade paper­back and an elec­tronic book, and of the lat­ter, the City Paper observes: “It’s hard to call an e-book a page-turner—novels like The Solomon Scan­dals require a new word.”

(Pub­lished earlier.)

Related: Buy­ing infor­ma­tion and Major characters—from the mil­lion­aire ex-bricklayer to the Spinoza-crazed reporter.