Cover image of "The Coyotes of Carthage," a novel about dirty political consultants

Andre Ross is a high-priced field operative for one of DC’s top political consulting firms. But he’s on the outs with his boss and mentor, Fiona Fitzpatrick, the firm’s sole female founding partner. Andre is “a thirty-five-year-old black man with a criminal record, four felonies the court long ago sealed but that still appear each time he Googles” himself.” And that record comes back to haunt him at the most inconvenient times. Which will prove to be the case again on his latest assignment, a humiliating exercise to pass a ballot initiative in the boondocks of South Carolina with a budget of just $250,000 in dark money. This is the setup in Steven Wright’s debut thriller about dirty tricks and political consultants, The Coyotes of Carthage.

Just another job to earn a buck

With only nickels and dimes to spend, Andre needs to mount a stealth campaign that will permit PISA, an international precious metals conglomerate, to open a gold mine in predominantly White Carthage County. The mine will disrupt the local economy that’s dependent on hunting and fishing and release toxic chemicals into the water supply. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary for Andre or Martin, Fitzpatrick & DeVille, his employers. The problem is, he’ll have to work fast, with only eight weeks until election day. And in that time he must recruit a front man, organize a mob of volunteers, and use all the tricks of the political trade to persuade a majority of the population to vote against their own interests. Another day, another dollar. Except that this job will prove uniquely frustrating.

The Coyotes of Carthage by Steven Wright (2020) 311 pages ★★★★★

Photo of a small South Carolina town like Carthage in this novel about dirty political consultants
Downtown in a small South Carolina town like Carthage in the novel. Image: World Atlas

Political consultants bring dirty politics to a local election

Steven Wright clearly knows how politics works at the local level in so many communities. Which, of course, is nothing like what they teach us in high school social studies classes. Because self-interest rules, the public be damned.

Just to drive the point home, consider an experience I had as a teenager looking into how local government worked in my home town in Ohio. The town, a small manufacturing city, was Republican to the core, and the country’s most reactionary newspaper publisher owned and operated its sole daily newspaper. So, when the mayor was grievously wounded in a car crash and reduced to a gibbering idiot by brain damage, the city council opted to trot him out to its meetings and leave him sitting in the mayor’s chair oblivious to everything going on around him. Otherwise, they would have had to run the risk of a special election where the dominant faction might lose to challengers who were very, very slightly less reactionary.

There were no political consultants involved back then, at least so far as I was aware. But here in Carthage County, things are different.

The five-member county council is actually determined to represent its citizens’ best interests. They’re set against selling the land to PISA or anyone else, because the local folks like it just like it is, a wilderness fit for hunting and fishing. And tourism is the basis of the local economy, to boot. Which, of course, will be destroyed if Andre Ross and his client, PISA, have their way.

About the author

According to Google Books, “Steven Wright is a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, where he codirects the Wisconsin Innocence Project. From 2007 to 2012 he served as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice. He has written numerous essays about race, criminal justice, and election law for the New York Review of Books.”

Prof. Wright holds degrees from Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the law school at Washington University in St. Louis.

Note: there is a more established novelist named Stephen M. Wright, who appears to be Caucasian. Prof. Wright is African American. Take note of the different spelling in their surnames.

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