This Is How It Starts

From the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, Grant Ginder's phenomenal debut novel follows one post-collegiate idealist on his quest to fit in with--and then distance himself from--capital hill's up-andcoming political and social elite who work hard but play harder.

Meet Taylor Mark: a recent college graduate who has moved to Washington, DC, to work for John Grayson, the less-than-brilliant congressman from his home district in Southern California. Washington is a city where deals are made behind closed doors, and there's no one better to teach Taylor--and Grayson--that lesson than Chase Latham, Taylor's former college roommate and the son of a powerful lobbyist. To Chase, the beltway's bars, restaurants, townhouses, and government offices are one big, debauched playground--a land of milk and honey where secrets are currency, the sex is bipartisan, and rules and boundaries are obsolete. It's a place, Taylor quickly discovers, where the line between right and wrong is razor-thin and loyalty based on college friendship quickly becomes a thing of the past.

This Is How It Starts is a sharp and incisively written novel about how far one young man will go to be an insider in a town that is unyielding in what it will take from a person in exchange for granting him a margin of knowledge and power.