Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Where There's Smoke by L.A. Witt Where There's Smoke. Anthony Hunter wonders what the hell he's gotten himself into when he agrees to manage an unproven candidate's campaign for governor of California. As soon as he meets the gorgeous, charismatic - and married - politician, attraction gives Anthony's rock-solid professionalism a run for its money, and Anthony knows he's in way over his head. Jesse Cameron doesn't like the idea of putting himself out there as a happily married, wholesome candidate, but his retired senator uncle insists it'll give him an edge over a challenging rival. The only problem is that Jesse's marriage is over, existing only to maintain his heterosexual facade. Oh, and there's that minor detail about his undeniable attraction to his smoking hot campaign manager. Or the fact that the attraction is very, very mutual. Before long, temptation explodes into a sizzling, secret relationship, but under the microscope of the media and the relentless scrutiny of the voting public, Anthony and Jesse can only keep their secret for so long. And this is one scandal a campaign won't survive. This book was previously published and has been lightly revised from its original version. 111,000 words. Genre: Romance. Covet Thy Neighbor: A Tucker Springs Novel. Tattoo artist Seth Wheeler thinks he’s struck gold when Darren Romero rents the apartment across the hall. The new guy is gorgeous, witty, and single, plus he’s just the right blend of bold and flirtatious. Perfect. Except then Darren reveals that he moved to Tucker Springs to take a job as the youth pastor at the New Light Church. Seth is not only an atheist, but was thrown out by his ultra-religious family when he came out. He tends to avoid believers, not out of judgment but out of self-preservation. But Darren doesn’t give up easily, and he steadily chips away at Seth’s defenses. Darren is everything Seth wants in a man . . . except for that one massive detail he just can’t overlook. Is Darren’s religion the real problem, or is it just a convenient smoke screen to keep him from facing deeper fears? It’s either see the light, or risk pushing Darren away forever. Where There's Smoke by L.A. Witt. Pia Witte wears heavy, black eyeliner around her big, dark brown eyes, a way of drawing attention away from the wrinkles in her face. Once again, she has spent half the night lying awake. She has had trouble sleeping since the arrest of her son Marcel in Peru five years and eight months ago. This time Marcel called her at four in morning, as he often does. He was crying. He told her that he needed money and was afraid -- almost as afraid as his mother. Marcel Witte has been held in a prison on the outskirts of Lima, Peru since November 2003. More than 3,000 prisoners are crowded into the facility, which was built to house 500 prisoners. Trickles of excrement and leftover food crisscross the prison grounds. A European who hopes to survive there must purchase a cell for $1,000 (€715) and pay $250 (€180) in monthly rent. The cells can be locked from the inside, providing protection against violent prisoners and unpredictable guards. But securing one of these cells is no guarantee of winning the daily battle for survival. It is a struggle that German director Peter Dörfler has documented in his latest film, "Achterbahn" ("Roller Coaster"). "I can't remember the last time I slept well. I'm so afraid that I won't hear the phone when my son calls," Pia Witte told SPIEGEL ONLINE. And yet, when she does hear the phone, she is also afraid of what the call could mean. Is Marcel injured? Has he tried to commit suicide, as he did once before? Is he dead? She blames Norbert Witte, Marcel's father, for the constant pressure, fear and uncertainty of her life today. Norbert Witte is a tall, compact man with a full head of hair and a gray moustache. He is a chain-smoker, has a winning smile and slightly protruding eyes. Some say he is a down-to-earth guy with his heart in the right place, while others call him a charlatan. Witte comes from an affluent German family of carnival performers and ride owners. His grandfather Otto was a famous carnival artist who once swindled his way into acquiring the title "King of Albania." Norbert Witte, who was born in Hamburg, seems to have inherited his delusions of grandeur from his grandfather. From the Biggest Fairground To Bankruptcy. Witte wanted to make it big in the amusement park world. After German reunification, he dreamed of turning the Plänterwald, a popular state- owned amusement park in Berlin in the days of East Germany, into the biggest fairground in reunified Germany. The "King of Carousels," as his friends called him, decided to invest in the park, which he called "Spreepark" and operated under his wife's name. It went well at first, but when the city government eliminated 3,000 of the park's parking spaces, visitors stopped coming and Spreepark went out of business. In December 2001, manager Hans Ludwig Trümper was forced to file for bankruptcy, leaving the city-state of Berlin and banks with a mountain of debt totaling €15 million ($21 million). In January 2002, Witte left Germany and moved to Peru, taking along his family and six carnival rides. He wanted to start over again in Lima and turn the big wheel once again. This time, he planned to open an amusement park, called Lunapark, directly in front of a major supermarket. He sent his wife and their five children ahead. It was the first time Pia Witte had relied on her husband's judgment without asking questions. Uncharacteristically, this time she kept out of the plans and preparations for the family's new life and did not take control. Her husband assured her that he had found a house and that everything had been taken care of. It was the biggest disappointment of her life. When Pia Witte arrived in Peru, a completely foreign country to her, nothing had been taken care of. Nothing at all. She began searching for a house for the family, and was cheated several times, but she eventually found an opulent villa in one of the city's typical wealthy enclaves. It was the beginning of the plight of the family, which had come to Peru with only meager savings. The problems continued when Peruvian customs officials refused to release the carnival rides in their entirety. Instead, they released individual parts from the shipping containers, making it impossible to assemble a single roller coaster or Ferris wheel. "He Must Have Had no Other Choice" The slide into poverty happened quickly. Within a few months, Pia Witte was having trouble feeding the family, and she flew back to Germany with four of her five children. Her husband and their son Marcel, who was 21 at the time, stayed in Lima. Norbert Witte, deeply in debt and desperate, allowed himself to be recruited by an old friend from Berlin -- as a drug courier for the Peruvian mafia. Back in Germany, his wife was completely unaware of his new line of business. "My husband and drugs? He used to complain when the kids smoked," says Pia Witte. "He must have had no other choice." Witte hid 167 kilograms (76 pounds) of pure cocaine -- compressed into 211 small disks, with a market value of €10 million ($14 million) -- in the 12-meter (39-foot) steel mast of the "Flying Carpet" carousel. He told customs officials that the carousel had to be shipped to Germany for repairs. But a supposed accomplice turned out to be an undercover drug investigator, and the smuggling operation was exposed. On Nov. 5 and 6, 2003, Norbert and Marcel Witte were arrested, the father in Berlin and the son in Peru. In May 2004, the Berlin District Court sentenced Norbert Witte to a seven-year prison term. After four years, most of it spent in a low-security, open facility, he was released from the prison. But his son faced a much harsher sentence. "When I was arrested, I thought to myself: I'll be dead soon. Then I was taken to the police station, which was horrific," says Marcel Witte, who is 28 today and weighs 15 kilograms (33 pounds) less than on the day of his arrest. He endured three years in a dilapidated prison until, in October 2006, the Fourth Criminal Chamber of the Lima Court sentenced him to 20 years in prison. "You Have to Try not to Think about It" "I got involved with bandits, ruined Marcel's life and destroyed our family," Norbert Witte told SPIEGEL ONLINE. He is ashamed of what he did, but he is hopeful and is doing everything in his power to bring Marcel back to Germany. Unlike Marcel's mother, Norbert has no trouble sleeping, enjoying life or going out. Life must go on, he says. "To endure the pain, you have to try not to think about it," he says, smoking a cigarette despite his six heart attacks. Witte is good at not thinking about things. No one knows this performer as well as Pia Witte. The couple met when she was 14. Her father owned a bumper-car ride, and at 19 Pia married Norbert, the 21-year-old son of a carnival performer. Together, they purchased the "Catapult," the "world's fastest roller coaster." The couple, together with their five children, spent the next two decades on the road, traveling from carnival to carnival. Soon their business grew to include eight carnival rides and more than 40 employees. Their life went sharply downhill when Witte, on the night of Aug. 14, 1981, caused Germany's worst-ever carnival accident. While Witte was attempting to repair his loop-de-loop ride, the Catapult, at a fair in Hamburg, the crane he was operating collided with the "Skylab," a carousel. Seven people were killed and 15 injured, some seriously. "Being responsible for that accident -- that was the worst feeling in my life," he says today. Successful years followed -- and so did an admission of complete failure. It took the couple years of hard work to reestablish their reputation, and during this time they toured separately in Europe. Pia, 24 at the time, traveled alone through Yugoslavia with six carnival rides, an eight-month-old baby and 30 employees. Pia Witte, a striking, proud woman with pitch-black hair, clearly finds it difficult to talk about her imprisoned son. In her tiny apartment outside Berlin, she is surrounded by the remnants of a once-comfortable lifestyle: oil paintings in garish frames, petite dressers and ostentatious arrangements of plastic flowers. But there is nothing of any value. She recently took yet another ring to a pawnshop to raise money for Marcel. "I'm finished -- financially, too," she says quietly. After a life of independence, it was difficult for her to apply for social welfare and admit failure. "I receive €300 ($420) a month. How am I supposed to live on that and support my son at the same time?" There are no relatives, friends or acquaintances left from whom she hasn't borrowed money, or who haven't slipped her some cash now and then. The 51-year-old feels deeply demoralized by feelings of self-reproach, for having left her son with his father in Peru. When she learned that her son had been arrested, Pia suddenly entered menopause, and her hair turned gray from one day to the next. "Gaining Marcel's freedom is all that I live for at the moment," she says. Two Trailers and a Bit of Optimism. Marcel's case dealt the deathblow to an already shattered marriage. "I will not forgive him for it," says Pia Witte, referring to her husband, from whom she is now divorced. "I just can't." Her dream is to own a concession trailer and work for herself. "I have to earn my own money and take care of myself, or else I'll be destroyed." Her ex-husband lives in two trailers on the rundown grounds of the former Spreepark amusement park. He earns a living making wooden stalls for public festivals. He has set up a workshop in a spot once occupied by a bumper-car ride. Witte isn't giving up. He wants to turn the big wheel one more time. "Once a showman, always a showman," he says, laughing. "I always have either a lot or nothing at all." Will he turn the corner one more time in his rollercoaster of a life? "I'm curious to see if I can make it to the top once again." Witte has never been this close to the bottom. Parents are there to protect their children, he says. "Therefore, I failed completely." These are not easy words for him, nor can they provide any comfort for Pia Witte. The last time she saw her son was when she visited him in prison this spring. "I will never forget the despair and look of panic in my mother's eyes," Marcel says on the telephone. Where There’s Smoke, There Are the Traffic Reporters of Los Angeles. Flying high above the fires charging across Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon, Mark Kono, an airborne traffic reporter, noticed that the 101 freeway was suddenly crammed with cars. He slowed the Airbus AS350 he was flying down to 60 knots. From above, he could see charred power lines that had fallen onto the highway and crews scrambling to de-electrify them. He readied his live shot and descended to an altitude of 1,500 feet. “You could breathe that smoke coming through the air vents. You’d feel like if you were to cough you would be coughing ash,” Mr. Kono said a few hours after he and Rich Prickett, the camera operator, filed their report for KTLA Morning News. “But if we can get the shot, we’ll do it.” As flames have ravaged Los Angeles, traffic reporters have emerged as lifelines through the chaos, stars in an urban, multi-fire battle that could compete with a disaster film plotline from a Hollywood studio. Their profession, sidelined in the age of apps and built-in navigation, is boosted by the thing technology still does not have — human judgment. Reporters have spent days navigating people home and keeping them out of harm’s way, with guidance beyond the turn-by-turn. Where a road might appear open on an electronic map, it might in reality be under a miasma of smoke too painful for breathing. A side street may seem passable, but just out of sight, a fire could be barreling down. Unlike a pileup or a road closed for construction, the blazes are also a breaking news event, throwing traffic reporters into the same mix as their news anchor counterparts, said Sioux-z Jessup, a traffic anchor. “What’s really challenging is that there are so many fires burning right now, and I am trying to get the most accurate information to the most amount of people,” Ms. Jessup said. Along with street closings and alternate routes, she said, she has spent days posting tips on Twitter, like the safest kind of gas mask to wear. “You want to give them the evacuation centers, and the school closures, and the wind conditions,” she said. “I’m trying to provide anything that they need.” At 3:10 p.m. on Thursday, Ms. Jessup went live on the air. “Folks, we have now six fires burning in Southern California,” she said, facing the camera. She rattled off the closings, followed by a list of evacuation centers and the number of structures and acres threatened by a fire that had erupted that morning. The conditions have introduced tremendous reporting challenges. The buffeting winds of up to 60 miles per hour that have fed the fire have grounded some traffic aircraft. Only the hardiest helicopters (more expensive ones usually operated by television stations) can withstand the current air conditions, said Desmond Shaw, who reports for both radio and TV. It has been too dangerous to fly the Cessna he reports from for KNX 1070 radio since the fires ignited. Like many of his colleagues, he must cover the story from the ground this time. “I definitely feel kind of hamstrung or helpless,” he said. “My city is burning and people are trying to get out of town and I wish I could be up above that helping people out.” Instead, he and other reporters work the phones, monitoring reports from the state Department of Transportation and Cal Fire. The news feeds flickering on viewers’ screens across the state — stark pictures of amber flames licking across mansions, horse farms and highways — belie what the reporters went through to capture them, Mr. Shaw said. “The shot is steady, but you’re not seeing the chopper getting knocked around because of the stability controls the camera has,” Mr. Shaw said. “Meanwhile you’re getting knocked around by turbulence like crazy.” Los Angeles is a city of gridlock. But the fires, which have consumed more than 100,000 acres and are still raging, create an entirely different traffic scenario. “You can Google and look in Hollywood and see these are the closures for the Oscars,” said Ginger Chan, a KTLA traffic anchor. “The difference is it’s fluid, it’s changing, the wind can shift, it can pick up.” Ms. Chan said officials from the Los Angeles Police Department had warned reporters on Wednesday that app-based GPS risked taking drivers into fire-affected areas. “For people who are not familiar, they are kind of trusting this blindly,” said Ms. Chan, who is married to Mr. Kono, the traffic pilot. “You’re running into a situation that will change on a dime, and then it’s putting you in areas that could be danger zones.” On Thursday afternoon, Ms. Chan was picking up her twin 3-year-old children at school after a workday that began at 1:30 a.m., extended hours for round-the-clock fire coverage. Few of the city’s veteran traffic reporters said they had ever dealt with so many simultaneous fires. “It’s indescribable,” said Scott Burt, an airborne traffic reporter for the radio station KNX 1070 News Radio. “I have seen this before, to a certain degree, but not probably this extreme.” The work is taxing, but rewarding, he said. “That’s what I’m here for, to help people,” Mr. Burt added. “And who doesn’t at work like a good challenge?” Where There's Smoke by L.A. Witt. S o little has changed in Dealey Plaza that — if one could ignore the towering monoliths of post-1963 Dallas — it is easy to imagine the motorcade is about to arrive. The Zapruder film has now become familiar to the public, and it stands as the best-quality film taken from a near-ideal vantage point. But we are also familiar with footage of the aftermath, thanks in good measure to broadcast-quality newsreel film taken by several cameramen back in the motorcade. This was the footage that was shown on the networks as that awful afternoon unfolded. The Rush to the Knoll! The "rush" to the knoll actually occurred over a minute after the shots, and was triggered by a Dallas motorcycle policeman in the parade, Clyde Haygood, who had no firsthand knowledge of the shot direction. Officer Haygood was a block away when he heard the first of three shots. After racing to Elm Street, he stopped just pass the fallen Newman family, parked his cycle, and ran up to confer with a policemen he saw on the railbridge. Only then did people start running up after him, falsely thinking he was after a culprit. The "rush" up through the walkway by the Bryan Colonnade occurred even later. Prominent witnesses like the Newmans didn't begin for over a minute; Jean Hill didn't cross the street for over two minutes. The initial reaction of most people close to the shooting was to simply drop to the ground or seek cover. Later, media reports and affidavits from witnesses would describe their impression — perhaps aided by the sight of Haygood and the tricky acoustics of the Plaza — that shots seemed to come from the area to the front of the car. Initially, the Grassy Knoll wasn't suspected by researchers as a source of shots. Thomas Buchanan, in his 1964 book Who Killed Kennedy? based a shot from the Triple Underpass on a "bullet hole" that reportedly passed through the limousine's windshield. Only when the Warren Commission demonstrated the windshield could only have been hit from the interior (probably a lead fragment from the fatal shot), and released the testimony of Sam Holland, did attention shift onto the knoll. The Grassy Knoll has since been a favorite of researchers, who've deduced "assassins" and "puffs of smoke" from numerous photographs that captured the area. In 1967 came the sensational announcement that a "classic gunman" shape was apparent on a frame of the poor-quality 8mm film taken by Orville Nix. Within months, Josiah Thompson had laid that one to rest, noting the same shadow pattern effect in a frame taken long after the assassination. In 1965, critic David Lifton studied copies of the Moorman Polaroid, which included much of the Grassy Knoll at the near-instance of the fatal shot. Lifton thought one of the bushes on the knoll was an artificial blind for a sniper. In 1976, yet another shape materialized from the shadows in a Moorman blowup in Robert Groden's book JFK: The Case for Conspiracy . From the same image, Texas researchers Gary Mack and Jack White presented a shape they called "Badgeman" in the 1988 documentary "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." That same year, at NOVA's request, technicians at MIT analyzed the shape, concluding it "took some imagination" to render it into a human figure. One shape on the knoll has been confirmed as human; the "Black Dog Man" figure at the Bryan Colonnade's retaining wall seen in the Willis and Betzner photographs as the limousine moves down Elm. Critics have made much of this shape, some even suggesting he was holding a "rifle." But a long-forgotten interview of Marilyn Sitzman by Josiah Thompson determined the shape was quite benign. Who Was Black Dog Man? That program opened with a live remote from Dealey Plaza that included one of the last interviews with the late Marilyn Sitzman, the secretary who steadied Abraham Zapruder as he filmed atop an abutment of the Bryan Colonnade. Pointing towards the corner of the retaining wall, Sitzman recalled: Nor, apparently, did Josiah Thompson care to associate the couple Sitzman first described to him in 1966 with the errant "fourth" shot recalled by the featured witness of his 1967 book Six Seconds in Dallas . Sam Holland, signal supervisor for the Union Terminal Railroad, who witnessed the assassination from atop the Triple Underpass. Sitzman told Thompson of a young black couple who were eating lunch and drinking Cokes on a bench behind the retaining wall. When the motorcade arrived, the Willis and Betzner photographs showed they had repositioned themselves near the wall's corner, apparently leaning with their elbows on top of the wall. Sitzman recalled hearing "a crush of glass and I looked over there and the kids had thrown down their Coke bottles, just threw them down." Her description of the bottle-breaking being "much louder than the shots were" and the possibility that sunlight reflected from the flying shards would account for Holland's claim of gunfire and a puff of smoke from the knoll. Thompson doesn't acknowledge it, but a likely reason Holland looked towards the knoll area in the first place was because — from Holland's position atop the railbridge — the Oswald window loomed above it. Holland later thought he could distinguish three shots from "the north end of Houston Street," also in the vicinity of the Oswald window. Holland's alleged shot from "under the trees" becomes an aberration of the exploding Coke bottle. Sitzman's revelation to Thompson was re-discovered by Massachusett archivist Richard Trask in 1985, who "in 1991 located the bench photo and put the scenario of the black couple together." Trask's 1994 landmark book, Pictures of the Pain , publishes an image taken on the afternoon of the assassination by Dallas Morning News photographer Johnny Flynn showing: Smoke and Mirrors. James Simmons located it "near the embankment in front of the TSBD." The wall is closer and more "in front of the TSBD" than the fence. In 1966, Simmons told Mark Lane it "came from the left and in front of us, toward the wooden fence, and there was a puff of smoke that came underneath the trees on the embankment." Simmons stood next to Holland — the only cluster of trees from their vantage point was that later described by Holland. Marilyn Sitzman was a lot closer to the stockade fence corner than Holland, yet the only unusual event she noticed was the bottle-smashing by the black couple — nothing about gunfire. That same day she told a police detective the shots came from the Depository. Likewise, Emmett Hudson, the Dealey Plaza groundskeeper, was standing halfway up the steps on the knoll, and heard nothing like a gunshot from the fence, a few feet behind him. Hudson would clarify for the HSCA that he meant the Depository when he described the shots as coming from "behind" him; critics had misused him as a second-gunman witness for years. The "haze of gunfire" Groden presents on page 204 of The Killing of a President is, of course, a burst of fall foliage as better revealed in the blow- up on page 46. There is little doubt that what David Lifton purports to be "smoke" on a Nix film frame is simply the tree shadow pattern on the sunlit portion of the retaining wall, seen clearer on the Moorman and Bond photos. The Nix film did, however, unmistakably capture the swinging motion of the bottle-breaking. Many of the witnesses who indirectly saw or heard the bottle-breaking and the couple's dark shapes immediately running from the scene understandably associated the events at the wall with the President's head explosion so nearby. The witnesses' insistence that what they saw was a "puff of smoke," the Parkland doctors' snap judgment of frontal shots, the failure of the black couple to come forward — and later on, the "rearward" head snap as seen on the Zapruder film — left the Grassy Knoll open to all sorts of speculation. The sad part is that Sam Holland gave an honest impression of what he saw which critics later molded to fit their agenda. Josiah Thompson had the opportunity in 1966 to ask Holland whether the "puff of smoke" could have been the bottle-breaking recalled by Sitzman, but it would have challenged his hypothesis of a simultaneous double-impact on the President's head. Ironically, Sam Holland had complained to Thompson about the subterfuge of an alias used by Mark Lane to gain a interview. Having been a Dallas Deputy Sheriff for 17 years, Holland had checked out Thompson with his old friend, Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker. Thompson's credibility was no doubt helped by being Life magazine's Special Consultant on the assassination. In Thompson's words, Holland complained that critics: Newman and the Umbrella. In his affidavit, Newman thought the shots came from the direction of the Depository, but was unsure as to the shooter's elevation and so looked no higher than the "garden." The Moorman photo shows the fence on the Grassy Knoll is more to Newman's right than rear, whereas the "garden" — and Depository — are more rearward. To millions of viewers of the Zapruder film, it does initially appear that, in Newman's words, a shot "hit the President in the side of the temple." The autopsy finding and discovery of the Z312-313 forward movement reveal the explosion of the upper right skull was actually an exit wound. In the "JFK" movie, a man with an umbrella in the heart of Dealey Plaza acts as a visual signalman for the assassination teams. No, Stone didn't make this up; there was a man pumping an open umbrella as the limousine passed him. But what Stone left out was that the man has been identified. In his Select Committee testimony, Louie Steven Witt recalled his symbolic protest action in the Plaza using an umbrella. To many researchers, Witt offered the type of innocent explanation Thompson thought �most likely� in 1967. There was another protester, with a handwritten sign across Elm from Witt. Both Witt and that man, like many others, lingered in the Plaza long after the assassination. Witt told the Committee that he wanted to taunt Kennedy, since the umbrella was supposedly symbolic of Joseph Kennedy's sympathy for Neville Chamberlain's attempts to appease Germany before the start of World War II. Chamberlain's famous "peace in our time" was read — in front of newsreel cameras — under an umbrella at a rainy airport. During the cajoling of convention delegates on the day JFK received the nomination in 1960, Lyndon Johnson chided his opponent�s father, saying "I was never any Chamberlain umbrella man." Critics note Witt said he didn't see "the President shot or his movements" because Witt was preoccupied walking towards the sidewalk and raising up the umbrella. Photographs show the Umbrella Man was already stationed on the sidewalk with a raised umbrella, and thus a clear view of the approaching motorcade. But consider the dynamics of the moment, such as the possibility that the first and second loud reports diverted Witt's attention towards the Depository as the President neared. Recall that Witt was in the Plaza to protest against the President — at the last moment, Witt could have seen the Secret Service agents and Mrs. Kennedy, realized the absurdity of his silly protest, and just couldn't face the President. Years later, he would not be able to recall the exact sequence. Louie Witt's open admission should have ended speculation over the Umbrella Man. Like other conspiracy candidates, such myths die a hard death in the critical community. It may be the questionable principals and skewed analysis of conspiracy authors that's the ultimate "smoking gun" in this case. They continue to lead millions on a wild-goose-chase up the Grassy Knoll. REVIEW: Where There’s Smoke by L.A. Witt. I really enjoyed the main characters in this book. I’m…ambivalent enough about the other characters and some of the plot that it affected my enjoyment of the book as a whole. Jesse is running for Governor of California. He has no experience whatsoever in pretty much anything. He comes from acting royalty but is a semi- reality-show also-ran himself. He has very little life history before his decision to run except for the fact that he’s married to an Oscar-winning actress. So his decision to run was never fully explained to my satisfaction. Yes, the Republican candidate is horrible. Yes, Jesse has name recognition. But he claims throughout the book that he can handle the actual job of governor but doesn’t know how to campaign. But really, he’s never done either. What in his background allows anyone to believe, himself included, that he’d be a good governor? Anyway, he’s also gay. His wife, Simone, knows about his sexuality and they’ve decided to divorce…right after the election. But until then, part of the campaign strategy, devised by Jesse’s senator uncle, is to play the happy-married, deeply-in-love couple. But Simone has Issues. She’s got a huge history with eating disorders that arises from her inability to access or process emotion. She tends to get vicious when she gets angry and she sublimates all stress into her eating disorder. So, it’s totally a good idea to put their sham marriage front-and-center of Jesse’s campaign, right? Right. Jesse’s senator uncle’s former campaign manager becomes Jesse’s campaign manager. Anthony is driven, exceedingly competent, as principled as he can be, a smoker, gay, and totally hot for Jesse. Jesse in turn is totally hot for Anthony. Anthony is convinced that Jesse is straight. Jesse can’t tell if Anthony is gay or not. Commence sexual tension. One thing you do well, Ms. Witt, is build sexual tension. The slow bloom of a relationship, the realistic movement from lust to affection to love is something you do brilliantly, and this book is no different. The scene in which Jesse finally FINALLY comes out to Anthony is just perfectly done (I’d quote here, but Loose Id is securing their ARCs and I’m not typing out the whole damn excerpt — trust me, it’s an amazing scene). The relationship between Jesse and Anthony builds so very slowly. For a long time, they can’t find time together to have sex because of the demands of the campaign, so they really have time to fall in love rather than just fuck like bunnies. I like that. I totally believed that these two guys love each other. And really, only you would be able to make a smoker sexy because it’s so much a part of his personality. That was fascinating. The book is long, more than 350 pages. So it’s almost inevitable, perhaps, that it sags badly in the middle. Once Jesse and Anthony have established their relationship as best they can, it’s pages and pages and PAGES of angst over the Catch-22 everyone is in. Simone is losing weight! But we can’t talk to her about it because she’ll just get mad and flounce away! But we’re hurting her! But we can’t help ourselves! And anyway, she pushed us together! But the voters! Over and over and around and around, with no solution until after the inevitable crisis point. The character of Simone really bugged me. Women in m/m romance is a fraught issue. Usually there aren’t any. Some dedicated m/m readers will actively avoid books with women in them. So any woman who is a main character in m/m is bound to carry a lot on her shoulders. So on the one hand, Simone is an interesting character with her inability to access emotions and her need to exert control through her eating disorder. But on the other, she’s incredibly annoying because she’s so irrational no one can talk to her and it seems that she’s just the figurehead for the Conflict rather than a real character. And the saggy middle harping on that conflict without a solution made it all a bit much for me. It’d be nice to have a female character in m/m who doesn’t have Issues. (Admittedly, Jesse’s personal assistant is female and a wonderful sidekick character.) So, as much as I loved Jesse and Anthony (and boy, did I!), the pacing issues and Simone’s whole character (and especially her final admission) really pulled this book down for me. The ending, though was a nice twist. I liked the reason for the Conflict and loved Jesse’s solution — even though it seemed a bit too cavalier, it did maintain his integrity. Overall, I couldn’t put this book down, but I did read some of it while squinting a bit.