From the moment Clemi walks into her office at a Washington, D.C., literary nonprofit, things go wrong. The place has been ransacked, her boss is missing, and a huge cat is sitting on her desk. (Clemi is allergic.)

When dark clouds roll in, do you stay and weather the storm, or do you run toward blue skies?

It’s safe to say Washington is one of the better-documented cities on Earth. Last year alone, the roster of books set in and around here included headline-snagging national bestsellers (Michael Wolff’s devastating account of the Trump-era capital, which sold 1.7 million copies in three weeks) as well as slightly less buzzy works (George Mason professor Dae Young Kim’s study of how information technology affects the region’s Korean immigrants, which almost certainly did not sell 1.7 million copies).