Eric Dezenhall knows spin from the inside. He worked in the Reagan White House’s communications office and went on to run a crisis management firm, advising companies and public figures when things go wrong. His novels put that experience to work. Spinning Dixie, published in 2007, is one of several featuring Jonah Eastman, a political operative with family ties to organized crime.
The story
Jonah has just been pushed out of his job as a White House spokesman when Claudine Polk, his first love, reappears and asks for his help. She is trying to keep Rattle & Snap, her family’s historic Tennessee plantation, out of the hands of her estranged husband. The case pulls Jonah back to the summer of 1980, when he was eighteen and fell for Claudine, and the novel alternates between that summer and the present.
Along the way it takes in casinos, Civil War re-enactors, horse country, Ivy Leaguers, covert government operations and Jonah’s mobster grandfather. It is a lot of ingredients.
What works
The two timelines play off each other well. The young Jonah’s mistakes explain the older one’s cynicism, and the shifts between them keep the pace up. Dezenhall is at his best on the mechanics of spin: how stories are planted, how scandals are managed and how image can be made to matter more than fact.
What does not
The opening chapters lean hard on metaphor and simile, which can feel like a barrage before it settles down. With so many elements, a few threads feel underdeveloped.
Verdict
A smart, enjoyable political thriller with romance in it, written by someone who knows how the game is played. Readers who enjoy it can go back to the earlier Eastman novels, starting with Money Wanders.
Sources: Spinning Dixie, Dezenhall Books; Damage Control Guru Is ‘Spinning Dixie’, Roll Call.
