Rita Bleiman

The past is often just around the corner.

Gloria Warren’s charmed life as a Capitol Hill employee in 1972, takes an unanticipated plunge into weirdness after a mysterious brief encounter with Thelma Jean, her 5th grade classmate. Unearthed nightmarish memories of Our Lady of Sorrows at the hands of Sister Ursula and of Gloria’s own shameful behavior follow. Guided by her instincts–which are almost always wrong–she sets out to make amends by embarking on a screwball investigation that is both hilarious and menacing and which puts her job, her sanity and even her life at risk. 

The names have been changed to protect the innocent (or not).

What happens when a young, lonely, ambitious political idealist comes up against a handsome, brilliant, powerful, older, married Texas State Senator?

Ideals are dropped almost as quickly as clothes in this laugh-out-loud novel about sex and politics in the ’60s With a zany cast of characters that could only originate in the Lone Star State, or in the mind of someone who grew up there, Dirty Tricks presents an insider’s view of the perceived high stakes of grassroots politics and the lengths to which ordinary people will go in order to promote themselves and their causes once they are infected with the virus called power. Rita Bleiman draws on her own experience in the political world. She left Texas in the sixties for Washington, D.C., where she worked for Senator Walter F. Mondale and the Carter White House.