In this installment in the USA Today bestselling series, Jessica Fletcher, Cabot Cove's crime-solving novelist, goes to Washington, DC, to promote literacy but finds a mystery.

Jessica is in Washington, DC, to support a senator's new literacy initiative. The week-long literacy event includes a visit to the White House to meet the president and a lavish party or two. But during one affair at the senator's home in Virginia, Jessica discovers the dark side of politics. She finds the senator's chief of staff at the foot of a staircase—and he has taken a permanent recess. Her search for culprits leads her from the halls of the Library of Congress to the DC social scene—and even to the FBI.