Mike Bowen, a trial lawyer practicing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the author of numerous mystery novels, including "Screenscam" (2002), which introduced Rep and Melissa Pennyworth. Bowen has been a member and moderator of panels at several Bouchercons and has made presentations at numerous other mystery-related events. He wrote the entry on The American Legal System for the "Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing," and was a member of the panels that selected the winner of the 1995 Edgar Award for Best Mystery and the 1996 Edgar Award for Best Critical or Biographical Work. Bowen graduated "cum laude" from Harvard Law School in 1976. While at Harvard, he served on the Board of Editors of the "Harvard Law Review," and was a member of the winning team and was named the best oralist in the Ames Competition (moot court). Bowen lives with his wife, Sara Armbruster Bowen and their younger children, John, Marguerite and James, in Fox Point, a suburb of Milwaukee.

On the night before the 2008 Army-Navy Game, a midshipman is found stark naked and barely alive in the lobby of a cheap motel near the Naval Academy. The plebes closest relatives are Ole and Lena Lindstrom, a pair of aging but still scrappy Wisconsin political activists who want lawyer Rep Pennyworth to help them get copyright protection for an audacious package of campaign ideas that put rich and ruthless gambling interests in the cross-hairs. The political neophyte they have in mind as a candidate heads a think-tank at UWM, where she is exploiting for her own political purposes the sensitive issue of domestic violence. Fifth in the Rep and Melissa Pennyworth series.