Ambition Love Treachery

Baltimore attorney Michelle Miller Ibanez is in a bitterly contested race for the State Senate. Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay is dying. She sees the bay as her personal heritage and will do everything in her power to save it.

Michelle hires Robert Stark and Associates to run her campaign. Stark though, is secretly working for the opposition and has plans to sabotage her. A financial analyst for Stark, Mr. Faung, is immediately smitten with Michelle. He feels a need to tell her story.

Stark is scheming to create news of a budget misappropriation, a bombshell just before the election. He also approaches Michelle’s broke and bitter ex-husband, Carlos, with a proposition to defame her for money. Her father, Buddy, drops his own bombshell. He has only months to live. “You’re the rock of this family now,” he tells Michelle. Adding to that and the increasingly vicious campaign, her son feeling abandoned by his mother, runs away. Robert Stark is also pursuing Michelle romantically. In the depths of exhaustion and depression she considers sleeping with him.

Mr. Faung has discovered an obscure financial safeguard in the Dodd-Frank Act. If there is time, he can stop Stark . . . if there is time.

L. J. Hippler lived, worked and played in Baltimore for more than four decades. He has degrees in Economics and Finance from UMBC and the University of Baltimore. Currently, he makes his home in Lancaster, South Carolina. But Charm City will always be a huge part of who he is.