In North Carolina, politics is a profession for some, an obsession for many, and a mystery for many more, but we’ve rarely seen a work of fiction by a writer with the experience and insight to paint our political portrait on a larger canvas, rich with telling detail and an insider’s grasp of the playbook. This is a book Redge Hanes was born to write; the question “How can he know all this?” can be answered only by reading his biography. Billy Bowater isn’t exactly a roman à clef, but if readers find some of the characters familiar, that’s the author’s intention entirely. Billy Bowater, a man in search of truth and meaning in a world that deliberately obscures them, isn’t exactly a projection of the novelist, but they’re from the same gene pool. There’s a great deal to learn and enjoy in this first novel, which any student of politics would be a pure fool to ignore.