Saturday, August 28, 2004
The author knows what goes on behind the scenes in politics.
By DAN DeLUCA
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Shakedown Beach," by Eric Dezenhall (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95)
Eric Dezenhall's "Shakedown Beach" reads like a Carl Hiassen novel hijacked from South Florida and plopped down in South Jersey.
Mostly, this is a good thing. "Shakedown Beach" is a well-observed thriller whose not-altogether-likable protagonist, Jonah Eastman, is a Republican pollster, a now middle-aged orphan raised by his Jewish mobster grandparents who went on to work in the Reagan administration.
Eastman advises Gardner "Rebound" Rothman, a former Philadelphia 76ers forward turned governor of New Jersey who, as the action begins, is running for a U.S. Senate seat. While swimming in the surf by his Margate house -- or doing unsavory things in an oversize birdcage with his mistress, the former Miss Egg Harbor Township, at Atlantic City's Celebrity Motel, Rebound dreams of one day bringing his family values image to the White House.
First, though, he needs Eastman's help in defeating his pious opponent, Judge Digby Stahl, and must avoid having his nasty secrets uncovered by Barri Embrey, an investigative reporter for the South Jersey Probe, known by those who fear her as Barium Enema.
Setting the scene
"Shakedown" is steeped in down-the-shore atmosphere, with scenes set in and around such Absecon Island landmarks as Lucy the Elephant and White House Sub Shop, as well as locales in Philadelphia, Cherry Hill, the Pine Barrens and the Cowtown Rodeo, near where Eastman and wife, Edie, and two children reside. And as summer gives way to election season, our hero must resort to political dirty tricks and .357-Magnum-packing sleuthing to uncover the ugly truths.
When it comes to the back room doings of political-operative types, Dezenhall knows of what he writes -- in realpolitik life, the South Jersey native is a former Reagan staffer and the president of a Washington crisis-management firm, and the author of two previous boardwalk thriller novels, plus the nonfiction "Nail 'Em!"
He can be funny -- describing "a chestnut-colored man" on the Margate beach as "slathered with baby oil and wearing a toupee that resembled a dead Yorkshire terrier," or having Eastman's nonagenarian Yoda, a wise old gangster known as Irv the Curve, refer to the social hierarchy at his retirement home as "like high school with a swollen prostate."
And he can be smart, too: as he mixes in substantive stuff about how Machiavellian operatives use focus-group research to convince voters they're getting what they think they want, or as he gets inside Eastman's midlife crisis.
Dezenhall suffers from Hiaasen-itis, diagnosed by telltale signs of the cutes and a predilection for the zany. "Shakedown Beach" works too hard to be colorful -- with an orchestrated campaign to whip up anti-Swedish feelings across the Garden State to demonize Rebound's Scandinavian opponent in a far-fetched subplot. The hilarity is often forced: A bar in Margate is called Cretin's Clearwater Revival. And Eastman's scalp is forever being saved by a larger-than-life Irish-Jewish ex-professional wrestler named Chief Willie Thundercloud, who's always there for our hapless hero.