Only a few blocks beyond the brilliant marble monuments, only a few steps behind the most powerful of Washington's elite, a whole, nearly hidden world exists - a world where high-profile fixers reign supreme while low-level bureaucrats jockey for Beltway "McJobs" and the city's impoverished slide further into squalor. Powertown follows a range of characters separated by endless differences and yet connected by the most spidery of threads - a lobbyist, a programmer for NPR, a journalist, a drug czar's flunky, a private security guard, a Salvadoran maid, and a teenage gangsta - as they are borne along a shifting and potentially calamitous current until their destinies converge in a shocking flare-up of violence.